Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (15 page)

Released in the first full year of the noir cycle, 1944—the year of
Double Indemnity, Phantom Lady,
and
Murder, My Sweet
—
When Strangers Marry,
in its brief six reels, managed to include a full complement of noir themes and motifs: sexual obsession, the wrong man, betrayal, hallucination, a manhunt, a shadow-haunted soundstage Manhattan (and one classic scene for the anthologies: Kim Hunter alone in a hotel room lit only by a garish neon sign, gripped by a mounting sense of dread). It was Mitchum’s debut in a genre with which he would be more strongly identified than any other actor. Here was the first embryonic version of Mitchum’s noir outsider and, too, the first of his gallery of lethal psychopaths.

On release, the Kings’ economical thriller was acclaimed by those critics who were actually willing to look at a lowly Monogram Pictures release. James Agee, in
The Nation,
wrote: “I have seldom for years now seen one hour so energetically and sensibly used.” Its reputation would continue to grow through the years, culminating in historian Don Miller’s unequivocal assessment of
When Strangers Marry
as “the finest B film ever made.”

Shooting on the King Brothers production had ended on June 3, overlapping by two days the start of Bob’s RKO contract. On June 5 he crossed the thresh-hold of his new home at 780 Gower Street.

RKO had been created at an oyster bar luncheon in the autumn of 1928, a merger of FBO (Film Booking Offices), a minor movie studio belonging to Joseph Kennedy; David Sarnoff’s Radio Corporation of America; and the Keith-Albee-Orpheum circuit of vaudeville theaters. Headquarters would be FBO’s lot between Gower and Melrose, directly adjacent to Paramount Pictures, on a plot of land previously owned by a Hollywood cemetary. Trade-named “Radio Pictures” for its RCA connection and recurring use of broadcast stars, with a logo of a beeping radio tower, RKO began releasing features in 1929, assuming a place beside Fox, MGM, Warner Bros., Columbia, Paramount, and Universal as one of the so-called majors of the sound era (Columbia
and Universal, in the beginning, considered somewhat less major than the rest). Through the years the studio would have its share of popular successes and award winners, producing some of the greatest works of Hollywood’s golden age—
King Kong, The Informer, Little Women,
the Astaire-Rogers musicals,
Gunga Din, Citizen Kane.
But RKO had never achieved the strong profile of the industry’s front-runners, hamstrung by lack of a clear identity (something comparable to Warner’s blue-collar aesthetic or MGM’s mix of glamour and iconic stars like Garbo and Gable) and a revolving-door policy for its production heads. With no presiding mogul-for-life, no Thalberg, Zanuck, or Cohn to set the course, RKO had lurched through the years from one interim regime to another, each with its own guiding principles and often questionable inspirations. After teetering on the brink of oblivion during the tenure of the artistically ambitious George J. Schaefer (patron of Orson Welles’s Mercury Productions among other bad business decisions), RKO in 1942 had begun a policy of “entertainment, not genius” as dictated by new production chief Charles Koerner. Koerner’s dedication to lowest-common-denominator commercial projects—a slate of musicals, comedies, Westerns, and horrors—brought the studio back from the brink, and RKO was posting record profits by the time Robert Mitchum signed on the dotted line in May 1944.

Nothing the actor saw in his first days at the studio did anything to make him believe he was out of his depth. He was introduced around, met supervisors who struck him as semiliterate at best and fellow “starlets” one step above retarded, floating around on clouds of their own self-satisfaction. “They had forty stock actors under contract at the time,” he recalled. “They were all six feet tall with lifts and padding. They all came in, chucked the producer’s secretary under the chin, and said, ‘Hon, did you get the script?’ Then they drove their Cadillacs to the Mocambo. I figured—these cats were
working?
I should own the joint!”

Production plans on
The Robe
had stalled.
^*
Instead of the biblical epic, Mitchum’s initial assignment was something considerably less prestigious:
Girl Rush,
a musical comedy Western starring the studio’s woebegone would-be Abbott and Costello team of Alan Carney and Wally Brown, with female leads Frances Langford and Vera Vague, the full-faced girl singer and the fluty-voiced comedienne fitting the movie around their performances on Bob Hope’s weekly radio show. The knockabout plot involved gold rush claim
jumping and mail-order brides and included a long sequence with most of the male cast members in drag. Four songs had been composed to order: “When I’m Walking Arm in Arm with Jim,” “Annabella’s Bustle,” “Rainbow Valley,” and “If Mother Could Only See Us Now,” a score worthy of a Carney and Brown vehicle.

Mitchum’s first scene came some twenty-two minutes after his fifth-place billing in the opening credits. He’d looked good on film before, but the RKO stylists had gone to work, and his appearance here was startlingly photogenic: rising up from a crowded dinner table, a pompadoured Superman in buckskin, huge shoulders and inflated chest above an impossibly slim waist, hands poised on studded, sexily low-slung gun belt. “I’m a regular faggot’s dream,” he mumbled at the preview. The film proved to be a good showcase for RKO’s new contract player. Mitchum exuded a maximum of masculine charisma throughout, did charming love scenes with Frances Langford, displayed a breezy sense of humor, and maintained his cool aplomb even in a bonnet and gingham dress.

Studio execs decided they were not happy with the name “Robert Mitchum.” A memo was sent to the actor: he would henceforth be known as “Robert Marshall.”

Mitchum responded: “Screw that.”

Someone from the studio told Paul Wilkins to explain to his client how things worked: he was their property now, they knew their business, and he ought to have the sense to defer to their judgment in these matters.

Mitchum had agreed to have his broken nose touched up for the sake of future fame and riches, but the request to change his name struck him as a more personal affront. Mitchum said, “I’m not changing it.” His father had given him that name. What the fuck. Forget it. He told Wilkins to tear up the contract for all he cared.

The agent pleaded his case to the studio. Bob had already gotten featured billing with his given name. He was already getting recognized, receiving fan mail. Bob was no ordinary actor, the agent said, and thus should have a name “as different as his personality.” Wilkins wrote to Ben Piazza, “I have observed that the main reason for changing a name is to try to build someone up who hasn’t made good under their previous name. This is certainly not Mitchum’s case. He desires to cooperate in every way possible, but . . . we request that he be known on the screen as Robert Mitchum.”

It was an arbitrary move on the studio’s part. After all, it wasn’t as if they
were contending with Spangler Arlington Brugh or Marion Morrison, the birth names of Robert Taylor and John Wayne respectively. But the studio did not like to back down too easily and told Wilkins to let his boy think about it for a few days.

One afternoon Bob and Dorothy had lunch together in the studio commissary. They met the English actress Jill Esmond, former wife of Laurence Olivier. Mitchum voiced his current complaint, and Esmond told them that years ago the studio had tried the same thing with her ex-husband, wanted to call him “Larry Olson” or some such.

Just then the producer pushing for the name change passed by their table. “Hello, Bob. Hello, Mrs. Marshall.”

“Mrs.
Mitchum,”
Dorothy said firmly.

“Oh, you’ll get used to it,” he said with a chuckle and went on his way.

“Who was that?” Jill asked.

Bob savored each syllable of a name the producer did deem screenworthy: “Herman . . . Schlom.”

Tim Holt had gone into the service, and RKO decided that Robert Mitchum—yes, he could keep his own damn name (Bob would claim that the frustrated producer bestowed the rejected name on his first son, Marshall Schlom, instead)—was going to step into Holt’s boots as their new B Western star. In July he went to work on a remake, the second remake, of an old Zane Grey title,
Nevada.
Just over twenty-four months after his first job in front of a movie camera, as a grizzled heavy trading bullets with old Hoppy, Mitchum was to play a starring role, the white-hatted hero, in his own low-budget oater.

The new version of
Nevada,
like the two previous, had little in common with the popular novelist’s original story, Norman Houston taking credit for the plot-heavy script centered around the discovery of the Comstock Lode. Assigned to direct was Edward Killy. This “feisty little Irishman” (per Robert Wise) was an RKO veteran who had worked his way up from assistant jobs to B unit director and was now in the process of working his way back down again. As a director of actors, Killy made Les Selander look like George Cukor.

Mitchum’s part, stoic hero Jim Lacy, like Hopalong Cassidy, rode with two saddle pals, to be played by a likable young actor named Richard Martin as the guitar-strumming Chico Rafferty and by perpetual ornery sidekick Guinn “Big Boy” Williams. There were also two leading ladies for Mitchum to smile at (though this demure horse opera allowed no hint of romance with either of them): Nancy Gates as the innocent daughter of a miner and glamorous blonde Anne Jeffreys as a worldly saloon operator.

“I was assigned to it, and I went, ‘No, not another Western!’” Anne Jeffreys recalled. “But they told me this was from a Zane Grey book. And that was what they thought was most important: Zane Grey. But they did say that Bob Mitchum was doing it, and he was good, and they wanted to build him up with this one. There was a mystique about Mitchum, even then, you know. You heard these stories that he had been a hobo and been to jail and all that. But then I saw him giving an interview to a reporter one time, and he said that he had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, from a very wealthy family. You didn’t know what to believe.”

Nevada
took Mitchum back to Lone Pine for ten days of location shooting. Back to the Dow Hotel and the Bucket of Blood Saloon. Long days filming in the scorching temperatures of midsummer on the alkali desert beyond Lone Pine proved to be sheer hell for cast and crew. “I remember that the cowboys—when it really got overbearing out there on that desert,” Mitchum said, “they’d gallop by the camera and sprinkle a handful of sand into it. Well, that’s about a two hour delay while they’d clean that camera up. We’d go and fall in the shade of a cactus.”

Nevada
castmates remembered Bob as a quiet man and something of a loner during this stay at the rugged location. “At the end of every day’s shooting,” actress Margie Stewart told
Western Clippings
magazine, “Anne Jeffreys and the rest would meet in the bar where our star was always found slumped down on a bar stool with his hat pulled way over his face. We would say, ‘There’s our handsome leading man.’ No comment from Bob.”

“He was a great guy,” said Richard Martin. “I got along with him—every one of us did—but he was controversial. If you
didn’t
like Bob Mitchum, you just didn’t like him. He wasn’t going to change himself in any way to fit what anybody else might expect of him.”

Anne Jeffreys discovered that the brawny cowboy actor had a brain. “He was very intelligent, carried on these very deep conversations. His looks didn’t call for that! He used to quote poetry. Very deep.
I
thought it was deep. . . . It was lovely. He was charming, and a lot of laughs, and very charismatic. One night after shooting we had dinner and Mitch said, ‘Let’s walk some of this off I said, ‘OK,’ and we took a stroll along the little road that ran through the town, unpaved, just talking and walking. We reached the end of the town, and the road ran along and out of sight. There was a glorious full moon in the sky that night. I said, ‘I wonder where this road goes?’ And Mitch said, ‘I have no idea, but it must be someplace beautiful.’ And so we walked on, and the road took us right into the city dump.”

•  •  •

The
Nevada
company returned to the studio for another two weeks of filming interiors. If Bob was supposed to be a star now, it was almost entirely theoretical. An unproven lead in a B Western, even a Zane Grey Western, apparently didn’t rate many perquisites in the RKO hierarchy. For the first couple of months they had him putting his belongings and change of clothes in one of the lockers near the public toilets. It was not much bigger than the one he’d had at Lockheed. Space was at a premium on the Gower Street lot, and you were expected to do your washing up at home. Dismissed at the end of shooting one late afternoon, coated in grime and various effluents, Mitchum went out on the lawn in the open courtyard below the executive offices, stripped down, and started showering with a garden hose. Somebody alerted Ed Killy to this spectacle and he came rushing over.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’ve got no place to take a shower,” Mitchum said. “I can’t put my clothes on over all this crap!”

Killy clutched his scalp. “For Jesus sake put your pants on!”

Then he dragged Mitchum to the producer’s office and threw a fit. “This is the fucking star of the picture, mister, and he hasn’t got a place to change his goddamn underwear!”

The studio arranged to provide Bob with a small dressing room.

Pleased with what they were seeing in the
Nevada
dailies, Herman Schlom and Sid Rogell scheduled another Zane Grey remake for Mitchum, to begin production as soon as a shooting script could be readied.
West of the Pecos
reassembled much of the
Nevada
personnel, including Ed Killy, Norman Houston, and cinematographer Harry Wilde, with actor Richard Martin reprising his role as Chico, the Irish-Mexican sidekick (the option on his seventy-five-dollar-a-week contract having been picked up). And once again location shooting would be done in and around Lone Pine. So much for the similarities. The style of the film was quite different from its straitlaced predecessor. Essentially comic in tone,
Pecos
devoted a great deal of its running time to a Sylvia Scarlett-ish subplot involving costar Barbara Hale disguised as a young cowboy and the merry fallout therefrom as she travels across the frontier with Bob, an oblivious gunslinger. In one scene, Mitchum pulls “cowboy” Barbara onto his lap while rolling a cigarette from tobacco pouch and papers and teaching “him” how to lick it closed. The cross-dressing frolic gets even more curious when straight man Mitchum throws open his bedroll and invites his transvestite trailmate to join him under the covers, spoon fashion.