Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (11 page)

Before the Lockheed job, Robert had made a commitment to another play. His farewell appearance, he figured. Now he had to rehearse and act and do the godawful job and wait for his kid to arrive all at the same time. It was a production of
The Lower Depths
by Maxim Gorky, directed by a Russian named Mike Stanislavsky and performed at the tiny La Cienega Theatre. Robert played his part in imitation of blustery character actor Gregory Ratoff. It was a shoddy enterprise. They’d be on the stage acting and all the lights would go out. It would be somebody in the dressing room plugging in a hot plate to warm up his blintzes. Sometimes the actors had to raise their voices to be heard over the arguments going on backstage. Robert was at the theater on March 8, 1941, when Dorothy went into labor. He rushed to the hospital in full makeup, a Russian peasant pacing the waiting room with the other expectant fathers. That night Dorothy Mitchum gave birth to their first child, a boy. He would be named James in honor of Bob’s long-gone father.

Robert’s partner at the Lockheed plant was a young, red-haired Irishman from the Valley named Jim Dougherty. “It started out that I would run the shaper and Bob was making the setups,” Dougherty recalled. “And then they put him on a shaper of his own. His machine you pushed by hand because the parts were smaller. There were sparks everywhere. They weren’t actually sparks, they were pieces of aluminum, and he got so he could direct them in any direction. And if the boss walked in there and Bob didn’t want him in there he would just send those sparks at him. We got along. We kidded each other. I’d throw a rag in his machine and it would crack just like a whip. He’d jump right up on the bench, yelling,
’Don’t do that; don’t do that!’

“Bob was a good guy,” said Dougherty. “Somebody you liked to know. Very easygoing. And a fantastic storyteller. During the lunch break he would always have a new one. About boxing. And riding the rails. They sounded like tall tales but we all enjoyed them.”

Dougherty’s girlfriend and soon-to-be wife was a fifteen-year-old beauty named Norma Jean Baker. In years to come, when Norma Jean had become a very famous actress named Marilyn Monroe, Mitchum liked to recall a warm social friendship with the child bride and future star. But these were more of Bob’s “tall tales,” according to Jim Dougherty. “Yeah, I’d hear him on television
saying how back then we all went dancing and saw Frank Sinatra and all this. It didn’t hurt anybody if he wanted to say it, but Bob never did meet Norma Jean when I was married to her. The closest he came was to eat some of her sandwiches. He never had any lunch to bring to work, and I’d give him one of Norma Jean’s, tuna salad or bologna. And I’d tell her my buddy didn’t have anything to eat and she started putting in an extra sandwich or two for Bob.”

On December 7 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and America found itself at war. Many of the young men at the plant went into the service, Jim Dougherty included. “Bob didn’t get in,” said Dougherty. “He said they wouldn’t take him in the military because he had false teeth. That’s what he told me.”

Production at Lockheed naturally increased with the war on. Now it was no longer a matter of workers hoping for some overtime. Everybody worked extra hours, like it or not. Some days when they got behind schedule or someone didn’t show, they were forced to work a full second shift: sixteen hours or more grinding metal in that hellish din. There was a foreman Robert despised, one of those hectoring types who liked to poke a pencil in your face. Robert gave him the hot sparks treatment. They got into a fight and he picked up something and threw it in the foreman’s face. They hauled him down to the office. They told him they believed he was crazy, certifiable. He waited to be fired and sent home. They gave him a three-cent raise. It was wartime. You couldn’t get fired. The aircraft factory was doing work vital to the war effort and jobs were frozen. You couldn’t even quit. He might as well be in prison, Mitchum thought.

At home things were no less tense. Within the family there was much dissatisfaction over Robert’s abandonment of his artistic pursuits, with antagonism directed at Dorothy for supposedly turning free-spirited Bob into a conventional wage slave. Mitchum felt increasingly uncomfortable, he recalled, “in light of my mother’s and sister’s accusative conviction that my wife was somehow responsible for what they regarded as ‘enforced labor.’”

Things came to a head early in 1942. He didn’t sleep anymore. He was disoriented all the time now, didn’t know whether it was morning or night, and was beset by hallucinations. “I’d think it was afternoon. I’d get up, take a shower, go to the kitchen and discover I’d been asleep for a hot twenty minutes. I hadn’t slept for a year.”

One morning he came out of the plant at 8
A.M.
heading for the trolley that took him home to West Hollywood. The trolley came, and he remembered
not being able to read the number on the front of the car. Somebody had to tell him what it was, he just couldn’t make it out. He sat in his seat on the ride home and looked out at the strangely clouded streets. He would hold his palm up to his face and try and make it come into focus. He made his way to the house and found a chair to sit in and told Dorothy that his vision was not at all as it should be. “I suppose she was a little alarmed, yeah. I was, naturally, because I had a lot of responsibility and I didn’t know how I was going to handle it. I mean, I couldn’t do anything for anyone if I couldn’t see.”

His sight did not return, and Dorothy took him to see a doctor. The doctor sent him to the hospital in Glendale, where Robert’s eyes were examined by an ocular specialist named Seymour Dudley.

“There’s nothing wrong with you physically,” Dr. Dudley told him.

“Hey man, I’m blind!” Mitchum said.

It was, said the specialist, a psychologically induced affliction. Stress, exhaustion, hatred of his job.

“What can I do?”

“Get some sleep. Quit your job.”

“They don’t let you quit. There’s a war on. I’m frozen.”

“We can get you out,” the doctor said.

“My family will starve,” Mitchum said.

“It’s lose the job or lose your mind,” the doctor said.

He had tried to be a straight citizen; no one could say he hadn’t tried. And it had gotten him a nice nervous breakdown in return. So that would have to be the last time for anything like that. He had fourteen dollars saved up. Dorothy went out and got a secretarial job. Robert’s eyesight returned to normal after some days away from Lockheed. His mother said, “Why don’t you try getting work in the pictures? You’d be a marvelous picture actor.”

There was an agent he had met back when he was working in a play downtown. What the hell was the guy’s name? Bob wondered. He had been very appreciative at the time, given him a business card and everything. He remembered it: Paul Wilkins. Mitchum looked him up and they got together. Wilkins was a third-string agent with no stars in his stable but a few character players whose commissions kept him solvent. He knew Mitchum could act. The boy was big and masculine, a little raw looking, more a cowboy type than a matinee idol. With his broken nose and ditchdigger’s shoulders, nobody was going to mistake him for Fredric March. Mitchum said that all he wanted was some work that paid him enough to feed his family. Wilkins told Robert they
would give it a shot. He would try and set up some interviews and keep an ear open for anything that might fit Bob’s type.

In the following weeks Wilkins carted the hopeful movie player around to some small-time producers’ offices and had him pose for a few publicity pictures, but they didn’t arouse any interest. Unsure if the agent would ever find him anything, Mitchum tried an end run with a friend from the Players Guild and registered for screen extra work. But even this mundane employment, standing around in crowd scenes, seemed to require an inside track. While he waited for something to happen he took a part-time job selling shoes on the weekend at a shop on Wilshire Boulevard. It was clownish work, on your knees wrestling with strangers’ feet, you were supposed to push the old shoes nobody wanted and make people believe the wrong size fit them perfectly. The salesmen lived for female customers who forgot to put on their underpants.

Toward the end of May 1942, Paul Wilkins called Robert to say that he’d gotten him an interview with Harry Sherman’s outfit. “Pop” Sherman was an independent producer of B Westerns, most notably the long-running Hopalong Cassidy series with Bill Boyd. Wilkins told him to wear a clean suit and tie. Robert had just the one suit at the moment, borrowed from somebody. It wasn’t all that clean, and the tear in the crotch of the trousers had been repaired with a strip of black adhesive.

The offices of Harry Sherman Productions were in the California Studios on Gower Street. When Mitchum got there he was ushered into an executive office occupied by the head man himself and several harried assistants. Introductions were brusquely made. Sherman and the assistants huddled over photographs and a resume Wilkins had supplied. They looked down at his pictures; they looked up at him in the flesh. They got him to say a few random lines; and when they heard his basso voice, one of them told him he’d have to raise his pitch a little for the sake of the microphones.

“You’ll vibrate. Sound like a gorilla.”

“He looks kinda mean around the eyes,” Pop Sherman said approvingly.

An assistant took Mitchum back the way he had come.

“What now?” he said.

The assistant said, “Don’t shave.”

He went to find Dottie at her job and told her she had to come out and celebrate.

“Guess what, your husband is going to be a movie actress.”

They went to a drugstore on LaBrea and shared an ice cream soda. When the bill came, he hunted for change in the pockets of his borrowed suit.

O
N THE FIRST DAY
of June, with the sun barely clearing the eastern hills, Tony Caruso’s friend and sometime roommate Pierce Lyden was sitting on a bench in the Los Angeles bus station clutching a ticket to Bakersfield when he looked up to see a bewhiskered Robert Mitchum coming across the waiting room. With a five-day growth on his chin and a battered cardboard suitcase in his hand, the fella looked like a refugee from skid row.

Pierce Lyden said, “What the heck are
you
doin’ here?”

Bob told him, “I got an agent and he got me a movie job! I’m off to Kernville on a Hopalong.”

“No kidding. Join the crowd, pardner. That’s where I’m going.”

Bob said he didn’t know one thing about the job. Was he supposed to bring his own makeup or his own horse or what? He didn’t know what his part was, but he told Pierce what Pop Sherman had said about his eyes lookin’ mean, and Pierce said that sounded like a bad guy part. Mitchum said he didn’t know if he’d be playing a young girl or a Chinaman, but for a hundred bucks a week he was ready to do it. Then somebody announced the bus for Bakersfield and the two men climbed aboard the Greyhound and headed north.

The Hopalong Cassidy series,
seven years
old in 1942, was an industry phenomenon, lucrative, respected, and influential. The title character originated in the popular novels of Clarence E. Mulford, a New York civil servant before he turned to writing some of the more authentic and entertaining tales of cow-boy
fiction, adventures of a gimpy, middle-aged drifter and trail boss. In February 1935, Mulford signed a contract granting the movie rights to his novels to Harry Sherman and a couple of partners in the newly formed Prudential Studios Corporation in return for the payment of $2,500 for each Cassidy movie put into production, with a whopping $250 due in advance. Sherman was clearly not looking to do typical Western shoot-’em-ups in the Tom Mix, Ken Maynard tradition. His first choice to play Cassidy was James Gleason, the scrawny fiftyish Bowery Irishman who more typically portrayed cabdrivers and fight managers. Gleason dropped out after a money squabble, and Pop went looking for another Hopalong, setttling on a more conventional-looking lead in William Boyd. The tall, fair-haired, thirty-eight-year-old Hollywood veteran was in the silent years a favorite of D. W. Griffith and C. B. DeMille (who cast him as Simon of Cyrene in
King of Kings)
and, with his pleasant, Oklahoma-tinged voice, a busy minor star in the talkies. In the early 1930s, a foolish case of mistaken identity hurt his career when the newspapers confused him with another performer of the same name, a theater favorite, William “Stage” Boyd, who had gotten caught up in a vice scandal. Bill Boyd began to hit the bottle. When Pop Sherman went out to Boyd’s Malibu home to offer him the Cassidy series, the actor was sprawled on the beach, sleeping off a two-day drunk. Sherman signed him anyway, at a salary of thirty thousand dollars for six pictures, with the proviso that Boyd give up liquor. To Sherman’s surprise, the actor would take an active and creative interest in his portrayal, demanding among other things that his Hoppy never resort to excessive violence and that his dialogue always be grammatically correct. Boyd’s characterization of Cassidy as a figure of good-humored compassion and avuncular authority was unique among cowboy heroes, while his distinctive look—the blue-black costuming, the tall-in-the-saddle posture astride a magnificent white steed—remains one of the immortal iconic images of the genre. From the beginning, the Hoppys were considered among the very best of B Westerns. They were well produced, with generally above-average scripts, solid direction, and good acting. Pop Sherman tried to find the best talents his restricted budgets could afford. He broke in many a tyro actor, screenwriter, and cinematographer who would go on to bigger things. And he would resurrect the careers of seasoned directors and others whose big things were all behind them. That was pretty much how it was when you hired onto a Hopalong Cassidy picture: you were either on your way up or on your way out.