Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (12 page)

Mitchum and Pierce Lyden climbed off the bus in Bakersfield and transferred to the “stage”—a bone-rattling, clapboard truck—that took them up to
Kernville, a tiny mountain enclave on the fast-flowing Kern River with scenic vistas in every direction, weathered old buildings, and its own Western movie street at the eastern end of town. The chamber of commerce did a brisk business in making the manufactured ghost town available to Hollywood characters like Harry Sherman for a daily or weekly fee.

It was past noon when they arrived. The sun was shining, the air tasted cold and clean. Taking up his cardboard suitcase, Mitchum crossed over to the entrance of the Mountain Inn where a bunch of cowboys were gathered on the open wooden porch. He greeted them with a big friendly smile, determined to make a good impression, but the cowboys only stared back with long faces. One of the bunch at last offered a spiritless greeting and said he would take Mitchum over to the wardrobe tent.

They went along the dusty Kernville street and Mitchum asked, “What’s wrong with everybody?”

“Did you know Charlie Murphy?” the guy asked.

“Nope. I don’t know anybody.”

“Well, Charlie Murphy’s just got hisself killed.”

Another cowboy player and stuntman, he’d been driving a four-up, a stagecoach drawn by four horses, and was having trouble controlling the rig when he hit a bump, lost his seating, and fell forward into the horses, under the horses, under the wagon, one wheel rolling over him, crunching his skull. He’d been driven off to the hospital in Bakersfield, but from the way he’d looked, everybody figured he was a goner. Filming was shut down for the afternoon as a show of respect. Everybody had liked old Charlie, even if he didn’t know jack shit about driving a four-up.

Mitchum was introduced to the costumer, Earl Moser, who suited him from the racks and bins of cowpoke gear—boots, jeans, chaps, denim shirt.

“What’s your hat size?” Moser asked.

“Seven and a quarter.”

Earl placed a well-used Stetson on top of the pile of clothes. Mitchum picked it up and found the rim all sort of crusty and stained. Moser saw him picking at it and took a look. “Oh. Yeah. This one belonged to ole Charlie. That was a real shame what happened to him.” He took out a kerchief and cleaned off some of the gore or whatever it was and handed the thing back.

“And that is how I started out in pictures,” Mitchum would tell it through the years to come. “In a dead man’s hat.”

He met his fellow players. There was Bill Boyd, Hoppy himself, friendly but aloof; the good-natured Scotsman Andy Clyde, who played Hoppy’s rubberlegged
comic sidekick, California; and the third regular, Jay Kirby, doing the male ingenue role. There was crotchety Russell Simpson, one of those character men you saw in a thousand movies without ever knowing their names. And George Reeves, a young hero type with baby-smooth skin and chiseled features on a Charles Atlas figure. He was going to play a Mexican peon in the movie. Bob had seen him in
Gone With the Wind,
one of the Tarlton twins chewing the fat with Scarlett O’Hara. A big break like that, and here he was, three, four years later, happy with day work on a Hopalong. Mitchum wondered where that left him with his broken-nosed mug, unshaven cheeks looking like a squirrel’s ass.

Most of the men gathered in Kernville were riding extras and stuntmen, and even if they had to speak some lines from time to time, few of them thought of themselves as actors. They were part of the Gower Gulch posse, a kind of
Legion Etrangere
of dispossessed cowhands come to Hollywood to scratch out a living, mostly in Poverty Row oaters. Some of them were veterans of the last big cattle drives, some were ex-rodeo tramps, some listed more regrettable experiences on their resumes. “Real cowboys and some outlaws,” Mitchum recalled. “The last fading few of the ex-train robbers who used to work silent pictures.” A tough bunch, they spent their down time drinking, gambling, and brawling. And they loved telling stories. They were barely literate, some of them, but they were champion storytellers; and Mitchum enjoyed their nightly swapping of tales of Texas stampedes and Hollywood Boulevard bar fights, playing poker with Wyatt Earp or screwing Louise Brooks. Some of those stories had been told so many times the teller could not remember if it had happened to him or to somebody else. Ever adaptable, Mitchum fell right in with them, sitting around at night drinking rotgut and matching their bull with his own ripe brand. The authenticity of the cowboys did much to assuage the vestigial embarrassment he continued to feel about making faces for his pay. With this rowdy bunch doing it, the job couldn’t be all that unmanly. They helped him in another way: his observational skills went to work collecting their personal tics and speech patterns and lingo. The look and manner of some of those roughneck, laconic cowboys would inform various Western and tough guy characterizations Mitchum would create in the years ahead.

When an assistant director asked him how well he rode, Bob told him no problem there, he’d grown up with horses on his grandfather’s farm. Then it came time to saddle up. Pierce Lyden: “He told me about all the riding he did as a kid, but it didn’t look to me like he’d ever seen a horse before let alone could ride one.” Mitchum’s assigned pony quickly threw him to the dirt. He brushed himself off and tried again, with the same result. Cowboys rode by,
glancing down at the new guy sprawled on his ass. Mitchum said to the horse, “Listen you son-of-a-bitch, I need this job, so it’s you or me.” The horse threw him again. Years later Bill Boyd told Bob’s brother, John, how he’d seen Bob haul back and slug the animal—”a right hand that made it roll its eyes backward.”

“He had guts,” said Lyden. “He just hung in there.” Later, actor Cliff Parkinson offered a bit of advice, and Bob found that it actually worked and was a lot easier on the knuckles: “Just
look
like you can ride, kid.” Mitchum’s confidence was bolstered when he learned that Hoppy himself hated horses and could barely ride even after more than two dozen Westerns. Anything above a straightaway canter required the services of Boyd’s double and stuntman, Ted Wells (a star himself in the 1920s in the old Pawnee Bill Jr. series, now reduced to galloping in long shots).

Filming got under way on
Border Patrol.
The unusual story line was the work of another of Pop Sherman’s discoveries, twenty-seven-year-old Michael Wilson, the future scripter of
A Place in the Sun
and
The Bridge on the River Kwai,
and in the ‘50s one of the prominent victims of the Hollywood blacklist.
Border Patrol
found Hoppy, California, and Johnny busting up the slave-labor operation of frontier despot Orestes Krebs, whose outlaw minions kidnapped Mexicans and put them to work in his silver mine (here was one of those “subversive” plot lines the witch-hunters of the House Un-American Activities Committee later decried, lefty Wilson trying to turn Saturday matinee kids against capitalism). Mitchum was to play the role of Quinn, a man wanted for robbery in three states and a stranger to soap and razor. He met the director, Lesley Selander, a brisk, no-nonsense guy who’d been doing Hopalongs for five years now. If Mitchum was waiting to discuss the part and the nuances of performance with Selander, he would be waiting a very long time. An efficient craftsman who would work on almost nothing but B Westerns for his entire fifty-year career, Selander had trained with Woody “One Take” Van Dyke on Buck Jones silents, and like that master he was known for keeping a breakneck pace both on the screen and on the set. He didn’t waste time, and he didn’t like two-bit day players wasting time either. There wasn’t going to be any of that Elias Day—style direction here, searching for motivation and understanding of the character. You were a shitheel trying to kill Hoppy; that was all there was to understand. And the motivation was the paycheck.

The first images of Robert Mitchum recorded by a motion picture camera appear in the opening scene of the sixty-one-minute-long
Border Patrol.
He is barely distinguishable in a few hundred frames of dusty, wide-angle action.
Chasing a sombreroed Mexican, Mitchum rides toward the camera with another bad guy. They both raise their guns, but Mitchum’s doesn’t seem to work and he stares down at it instead. It looks like a flub and would certainly have warranted a second take on another production, but Selander lived with it. The Mexican is shot dead, and Cassidy and pals come running. Mitchum gets a brief close-up and his very first line of dialogue, perfectly enunciated and delivered in a sonorous baritone:

“Come on, let’s get out of here!”

Les Selander called, “Cut!” and as Mitchum later put it, “My fortune was made.”

The actor’s celluloid debut contained several moments of awkwardness—a wandering gaze in a group shot, some odd tiptoeing in his wardrobe department cowboy boots—but an undeniable screen presence was visible from the get-go. There, in embryonic form to be sure, was the characteristic Mitchum style, the slow, deliberate motions confidently mapping out his piece of screen space, the precisely judged gesture and body language, the caustic, sardonic attitude projected through the heavy-lidded, sleepily sensual eyes that would soon garner so much attention. Transcending—if just slightly—the underwritten part, he gave to this utility bad guy a distinguishing air of smoldering menace.

In the absence of direction, Mitchum relied on intuition and observation of his fellow performers to help him make the leap from theatrical to screen acting. He no doubt learned much from the working methods of Bill Boyd, a decent actor who made everything he did on screen look natural. Boyd was a scrupulous underplayer, moving with a calm precision and speaking in a firm, matter-of-fact tone, seldom raising his voice. A seemingly generous performer, he never tried to hog the camera, crying for close-ups or upstaging the other actors. And yet on screen he never lost his dominating presence—the others had to shout, growl, or gesticulate to stay even with him. Mitchum, who would become one of the foremost exponents and masters of this style of calculated underplaying, came to see how the mechanics of filmmaking made ludicrous the grand gestures and projected speech necessary in the live theater but made possible, through the magnifying powers of lens and microphone, the creation of intimate, believable characterizations built out of gesture, intonation, even silence. In time he would learn, too, of the camera’s occult powers, its peculiar and inexplicable ability, under the right circumstances and with a compatible human subject, to read an actor’s thoughts.

•  •  •

The company worked a long day. If there was still sun anywhere in the sky, the camera kept turning. One time Mitchum watched as Andy Clyde was positioned in the only area of sunlight left at the end of the day, a spot with a big muddy ditch next to it. “Clyde fell right into the ditch. He stood up, brushing the mud and glop off him, and said, with dignity, ‘This isn’t the
theatre!’”

Working nonstop, and with only six reels to fill (approximately one hour of screen time), they shot
Border Patrol
in a week. The next film in the series, titled
Hoppy Serves a Writ,
went into production before the dust had settled on the last one. The unit packed up its camera and lights, costumes and six-shooters, and left Kernville for the the desert wastes and big boulders around Lone Pine. Mitchum went with them. For efficiency’s sake, Sherman tried to maintain a repertory company for the series, using many of the same personnel from film to film if they didn’t drop out for better-paying or more comfortable work elsewhere or for drunkenness that held up a production. Evidently, Sherman had been pleased with his new addition to the Cassidy troupe. Mitchum would end up doing seven Hoppys in that 1942-43 season. Only Bill Boyd and Andy Clyde appeared in as many. Lesley Selander would direct all but three of the seven. Two were guided by Frenchman George Archainbaud, once a big name at RKO, and one,
The Leather Burners,
by Joseph E. Henabery, a forgotten name from silent picture days. Bill Boyd would tell Mitchum about Henabery one night after the director had gone to bed. He was a former actor who played Abe Lincoln in Griffith’s
Birth of a Nation,
then became a major director in silents, putting Rudolph Valentino through his paces and living in a Beverly Hills palazzo. But that was then, and Henabery was working as a machine operator at Lockheed when Sherman hired him to call the shots on
Leather Burners.

“That’s how it can be in this business, Bob,” Hoppy told him. “One day you’re on top and the next you’re in the gutter. And there’s plenty of folks just waitin’ to scrape their boot off on ya.”

The Leather Burners
was memorable among the Cassidys for its bizarre climax, featuring a cattle stampede inside a mine shaft. It was Joseph Henabery’s last picture.

In six of Mitchum’s seven Hoppys he would be cast as various sorts of desperado; in just one,
Bar 20,
as an ambivalent good guy, clean-shaved in a three-piece suit, playing leading lady Dustine Farnum’s insufferable fiance. With
each succeeding job the Sherman people gave him more screen time, and with each his self-confidence and understanding of the medium would increase. The Hoppys were Mitchum’s film school and a formative and lasting influence on the career to come. The way they made those B Westerns, no frills, no pretense, just-get-it-done, strict egalitarianism—everybody swallowed the same dust, ate the same chow, used the same honey wagon—this would remain in Robert Mitchum’s mind the ideal, the most comfortable and least embarrassing way of making movies, an approach he would try to encourage no matter how far from those innocent and threadbare productions his career would take him. In the decades ahead he would sometimes find himself in rarefied branches of the cinema, in sometimes opulent and spectacular circumstances, earning a paycheck that would cover the budget for an entire season of Hopalong Cassidys, clutching at the world’s most famous women, reciting the words of distinguished authors, and listening to the direction of erudite artists and pretentious fools, and through it all he would act unwaveringly as though he were still making a seven-day oater back in Kernville.