Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (10 page)

“One day Bob showed up in town and asked if I could give him a bunk. So I became his landlady and found a bed for him and he moved in for a month or two; I don’t know how long he stayed. Every time I saw Bob he was up to something different, and this time he was gonna be a writer. And he tried. I’d be in the room with him while he was trying to work something out, scripts or stories he was hoping he could sell somewhere. Radio was big then, and he thought that he might write for some of the radio shows or somethin’. He was trying to find a way to make a buck in show business. We all were. But none of us knew how. We didn’t know shit from Shinola.”

El Rancho Broke-O: It was like a very poor man’s Garden of Allah, an affable roost and halfway house for aspiring or out-of-work movie actors and other Hollywood characters. Tenants floating in and out included Don De-Fore, future film and television star, and Pierce Lyden, perennial bad guy in low budget Westerns. Mitchum would sit among them with his steel Underwood and try and type out something he could sell, pulp stories for the magazines or some dialogue sample that might get him an interview at one of the radio stations or movie studios. He would often wander down the block to Rose’s Bookstore, a hangout for local writers. He’d sit in the back room with the scenarists and pulp hacks drinking jug wine, and he’d hope for some practical advice; but all he ever heard were obscene cracks about venal publishers
and moronic producers. One of the writers he met was a rising star of private eye fiction, Raymond Chandler, author of
The Big Sleep
and
Farewell, My Lovely.
“I wasn’t sure what to make of him,” Mitchum would recall. “I thought he affected a British accent, and he was always wearing white gloves . . . a nice guy, but distant, suspicious of everybody.”

As Caruso remembered it, the El Rancho gang would be off looking for work during the day and then at night roam down Hollywood Boulevard and hit the joints. They’d go see Wingy Manone in some joint. The Nat “King” Cole Trio played on Vine Street and you could go in there and listen for twenty-five cents a drink. And not everybody always paid for their drinks. Mitchum loved the music and he made the rounds every night. He was a devotee of the cool white-and-black small combos and piano players that performed around the boulevard, Cole and Harry the Hipster and Slim “Flat Foot Floogie” Gaillard. He admired the language of the hip musicians, and before long he’d made their jive idioms his own (an everlasting devotion, he would still be speaking that ‘30s and ‘40s jazz slang on his deathbed). “Bob soaked up life in those days, you know?” said Tony Caruso. “He liked everything. He took it all in. He liked to live hard. He liked to drink hard. Women. You name it.”

One day Mitchum packed up and left El Rancho Broke-O. “The writing didn’t work out, I guess. He didn’t write anything worth a damn. And then he took off and I wished him well. And the next thing I knew about Bob Mitchum he was in a picture.”

When Annette began getting steady gigs and tired of the long commute from Long Beach, she took an apartment in Los Angeles and Robert moved in for a while. They had such a close relationship—a mutual mind-reading act after all—that as two single people living together in the small apartment, his sister would recall, some people in Hollywood had “weird” ideas about them. Robert was a poor choice of roommate in any case, always avoiding his small share of the chores, never cleaning up whatever mess he left behind him. But he was soon moving along. One of the characters from Annette’s nightclub crowd, celebrity astrologist Carroll Righter, had on occasion paid Bob to punch up his lecture act. Generally impressed by the young man’s talent and his striking physique, Righter offered him a job as his secretary-chauffeur for an upcoming lecture and chart-reading tour of the tony winter resorts of Florida. The salary was not bad, there was a plush Cadillac for the driving, and the trip might allow him a chance to see “his girl,” Dorothy, presumably waiting with eternal patience for his next visit.

They set off for Florida in January 1940. The long ride went without incident until they reached Louisiana and a sudden storm washed over them. The car slid out of control, leaped off the edge of the bridge they were approaching, and plowed into swampy water. Mitchum sprang through the window and scrambled to safety, but Righter had been hit in the neck by the portable typewriter stowed on the back shelf and he lay on the floor, stunned. The car looked as if it could slide underwater at any moment, but Mitchum stomped back into the muck, forced the door open, and dragged Righter clear.

“You saved me,”
the astrologist sputtered.
“You risked your life to save mine.”

“What did you want me to do, read a magazine?” Mitchum said.

A truck driver stopped and came down to help pull Righter to solid ground and then took them to the nearest town. The fire department towed the Cadillac out of the bayou, and the boys at the gas station got it running and cleaned it up, but the fabric-covered seats had gotten so wet that they oozed like a dirty sponge for the rest of the drive. They had to sit on old newspapers and torn cardboard boxes to keep their pants dry. “It’s like I’m back ridin’ on a fucking freight train,” Mitchum complained.

They got to Florida, setting up shop in beachside hotels among the vacationing elite in Saint Petersburg, Naples, and Palm Beach. Robert was expected to drum up business for the lectures among the lounging dowagers and divorcees. “We charged a dollar admission for people wanting to find out what was giving with the stars. After the old guy gave his spiel, I’d pitch the women into having a horoscope reading.”

The tour had not quite concluded when Mitchum went to Righter and told him he was quitting to go north to find his fiancee and get married. Righter asked him if he knew Dorothy’s birthday. Robert told it to him.

Carroll Righter stared back silently, then slowly, ruefully turned his eyes to the ceiling and shook his head.

“A
Taurus
 . . . dear boy . . . no . . . no . . . no. . . .”

Dorothy Spence’s parents, her friends, almost anyone who could catch her ear, had told her to forget him. He was a bum, and even if he wasn’t a bum he was gone now, had a new life in California. It was like waiting for a ghost. She wouldn’t listen, didn’t care what anyone said about him. She knew Bob’s faults and she didn’t care. They loved each other and that was that, and to heck with what they all thought. She was working at the insurance company in Philadelphia when he arrived—it was the middle of March—freezing cold in his Palm Beach finery, ice cream suit and panama hat. He told her he had won some
money in a crap game and they were going to get hitched. Right away. Didn’t want them waiting for her family to get involved and try and talk her out of it. Dottie, looking shaken, went to her office and told them she was going to need some time off. Her coworkers passed the hat and gave her a hundred dollars as a wedding present. A friend named Charlie Thompson agreed to be best man, and the three of them drove to Dover, Delaware, for a marriage license and then combed the town for a ring and a nice dress for Dorothy to get married in.

“Robert found a plain gold band,” Dorothy would remember, “but then came the problem of measuring my finger. He and Charlie solved the problem by borrowing the jeweler’s sample scale and going out to look for me. They’d forgotten the name of the store I’d gone into, so they simply wandered up and down the main street. At last I saw them through the window, so I pulled on the gown and ran into the street. We measured my finger on the sidewalk, and I tore back into the shop before they could get the idea that I’d run off with their dress.”

On the evening of March 16, 1940, they got into Thompson’s car and drove out to the home of a Methodist minister. “He led us into the living room,” said Dorothy, “and I remember the temperature seemed somewhere below zero. So we adjourned to the kitchen where there was warmth, plus a rather strong smell of cabbage.”

The old minister buttoned up his frock coat while his wife abandoned the stove and removed her apron. “Do you want the old service or the new one?” the minister asked.

Dorothy said, “The old one.”

It sounded more romantic.

The next day the newlyweds bought two tickets for California and boarded the Greyhound bus.

With Annette making a living in LA, the Morrises decided they, too, had had enough of Long Beach. They found a small house for rent at 954 Palm Avenue in West Hollywood and they all moved in, the Major and Ann, Carol, Jack, Annette, and Tony. When Bob telegraphed to say he was bringing home a brand-new wife, they wondered where they were going to put the couple. Out in the backyard was a chicken shack that had been built by the previous tenants—there were still a few feathers lying around—and it looked big enough
to fit a bed and things, so the family decided it could be Bob and Dorothy’s honeymoon cottage. “We got the Lysol and the scrub brushes and cleaned out the chicken coop,” said Annette. “We got out all the smells and dressed it up so it was beautiful. Made a nice little bungalow out of it. And that was where Bob and Dot first lived until he made some loot and they could get their own place.”

For a time they thrived on the narcotic aftereffects of their long anticipated union. That couldn’t last. Robert, like one who has only belatedly read the fine print on a contract, bristled to learn that society imposed certain constrictions on the married man: for instance, you were supposed to spend all your time around this one broad. And Dorothy, who’d thought Bob’s writing for nightclub performers sounded rather glamorous when he told her about it on the Greyhound bus, soon came to realize that it did not provide anything like a steady salary and often kept him out on the town till dawn with a lot of odd characters, including women. She was happy, no doubt; they had waited so long, and no one had thought it would ever happen, and now she had his ring on her finger. But it had to be a strain . . . nights lying in bed alone in the chicken-coop bungalow.

The house on Palm, overcrowded already with the permanent residents, was forever filled with friends of the family, musicians and actors and aspiring playwrights and little-theater directors and astrologers and mystics, eccentrics of every stripe, characters like no one Dorothy had ever met in Delaware—her husband excepted, of course. She got along with everybody, but the new Mrs. Mitchum was down-to-earth, not head-in-the-clouds, and there were recurring if indirect suggestions that she was not living up to the family’s bohemian standard.

Robert was lured back into acting, taking one of the leads in a nonpaying little-theater production of a play by Claire Parrish called
Maid in the Ozarks.
A response to the great Broadway success of
Tobacco Road,
it had a similar rustic setting and required the entire cast to speak in ersatz hillbilly twangs. Playing one of the concupiscent Ozarkians was a very young blonde actress named Gloria Grahame, who would work with Robert many times in the years ahead in the movies, though such success was not then even a dream for either of them. Hanging around the cast, John Mitchum was introduced to Gloria’s older sister, Joy, they began seeing each other, and the two were married by the end of the year.

Bob would most likely have continued on with his haphazard and penurious
creative pursuits if not for the fact that Dorothy learned she was pregnant. He had up to now cleverly avoided most of the trappings of responsibility, but the threat of fatherhood, and perhaps Dorothy’s pronounced reluctance to bring a child into the world without a dime to their names and while living in a converted chicken coop, would give Mitchum pause. He had to pull himself up by the lapels and face the fact that the time had come at last to stop fooling around, making castles in the air, and go find some tangible occupation with a regular paycheck at the end of every week. In his mind, some small, very distant voice he was not familiar with told him that if you were a guy who had gone and gotten himself married and there was a child and—according to the radio—a war coming on, then what you did was you got yourself a lunch box and went to work.

Hitler was raging across Europe, and storm clouds hovered over the United States. The defense industry had rapidly expanded with the growing likelihood of U.S. participation in the conflict, and the armament and aircraft factories of Southern California were now operating on round-the-clock schedules. Jobs were plentiful, and Mitchum quickly found a position as a sheet metal worker at the Lockheed Aircraft plant in Burbank. The base pay was $29.11 a week, though you could easily average a take-home of $42 with regular overtime hours. He was assigned to the graveyard shift, from midnight to morning, six nights a week. He was given a visor and a lead skirt. He was given a rubber apron.

It was the beginning of the worst year of his life.

Work in the plant was noisy and dangerous and something of a grift. “We were making a lot of obsolete airplanes (old Lockheed Hudsons) that we sold to the British, and they didn’t want ‘em, but they were stuck with the contract. I didn’t like the whole idea of it.” He was a shaper operator. He fed sheets of metal into a machine. The machine went
screeeeeechunkchunkscreeeeee,
ear-piercing metallic sounds, with knives sticking out all over it, spinning around at 26,000 revolutions per minute, throwing out streams of red-hot metal. To Robert it looked like something dreamed up by Edgar Allan Poe. He would stand before it with a kind of hypnotized horror, waiting for his fingers to get lopped off and shaped and bloody sparks to fly out. When somebody’s machine malfunctioned, you held your breath. Blades would come loose and shoot across the floor. One time Mitchum saw a knife come loose and slice
right through the wall of the building. It finally landed somewhere in Glendale, he believed. Many of the workers were Oklahoma farm boys out of Steinbeck, innocent fellows right off the horse-drawn plow. The Okies would write home with wonder, said Mitchum, “Hoowee, you ort to see this here machine!” They’d be scratching themselves and forget what they were doing and the next thing you knew they had lost an arm.