Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (16 page)

“Nothin like company on a cold night,” says Mitchum. “Come on, kid, get in.”

“I want to sleep alone,” says the “boy.”

“Oh no you don’t. Come on, get in and cuddle. . . .”

Mitchum was increasingly confident in front of the camera, the good-humored performance in
West of the Pecos
a sizable improvement over his work in
Nevada.
As the earlier film’s earnest hero he seemed interchangeable with any number of deadpan B picture cowboy stars. In
Pecos
he began to reveal the lurking possibilities. He was charming, slyly funny, coolly laid back—a rather
hip
horse opera star. His improved riding skills were also evident, notably in a full gallop one-hand-on-the-reins running insert.

The studio execs were pleased with what they saw in both
Nevada
and
West of the Pecos.
Mitchum’s rugged good looks were really coming across—there were fewer cracks about him resembling a beached shark. RKO foresaw a long line of Zane Grey horse operas in the new boy’s future.

Mitchum, who had originally come to the studio after Mervyn LeRoy’s big talk about megabudget productions like
The Robe,
let it be known that he was eager to do something that didn’t require the use of a saddle. The King Brothers tried to borrow him for the title role in their next film,
Dillinger,
but the studio’s Ben Piazza told them that the part and the project were too unsavory for their rising star. The role went to Lawrence Tierney, and the picture made a fortune. Mitchum lobbied for the part of Sonja Henie’s hockey player love interest in a romance called
It’s a Pleasure.
Producer David Lewis tested him and decided that Mitchum dwarfed the dainty skater. Lewis went with the shorter Michael O’Shea. Mitchum sulked. Wilkins told him to relax, something good would come. There was plenty of time. For now, why didn’t he try and enjoy being the new Tim Holt?

Throughout the summer and fall of 1944, independent producer Lester Cowan and director William Wellman were preparing to make a film,
The Story of G.I. Joe,
based on the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle. For Wellman—”Wild Bill” of legend, a tough-talking, whip-cracking Hollywood character and director of classics like
Wings, The Public Enemy, Nothing Sacred,
and
The Ox-Box Incident
—
G.I. Joe
had become one of those rare projects that grabbed him by the balls, a personal obsession. Well-man’s filmography included classics and clunkers, but he was determined to
get this one right, putting the truth and poetry of Pyle’s writing on celluloid. Wanting to avoid movie star glamour at all costs, Wellman had been looking for new faces to populate his cinematic Company C, Eighteenth Infantry. He would claim that he didn’t even know Mitchum was in the business when he saw the man for the first time and, in signature Wild Bill style, accosted him in front of the Brown Derby restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard.

“What’s your name, bub? Mine’s Wellman.”

“Bob Mitchum. And the purpose of your inquiry?”

“I make pictures. What do you do for a living?”

“That, Dad, is a matter of opinion.”

One day some months before, Lester Cowan had arrived at William Wellman’s Beverly Hills house. Unknown producers didn’t usually show up unannounced on the Wellman doorstep, the director told him, and even if he knew him he would certainly never let a producer come inside. Cowan said to listen, that he was going to make a great movie about the American foot soldier, the best thing of its kind, from the Ernie Pyle stories, and Wellman was the only man who could direct it.

Wild Bill had been a pilot in the French Foreign Legion’s Lafayette Flying Corps during World War I, a colorful experience he never got tired of invoking. Wellman told Cowan, “You’re talking to an old broken-down old flier. . . . I hate the goddamn infantry and I don’t want to have anything to do with them and please thank Mr. Pyle, but not for me.”

A few days later, Lester Cowan had Pyle himself call the director and try and make him change his mind. Pyle told him of the great need for such a picture and what it would mean to all the kids fighting for his and Wellman’s country. The director reluctantly agreed to visit with Pyle at his home in Albuquerque. The writer who had been traipsing around the European war fronts turned out to be a frail, gray-haired, middle-aged man. Pyle’s home life was modest and lonesome. His wife stayed in her room and drank. Ernie slept in the garage. Wellman settled into the guest room, uncertain what he was doing there. He had yet to read a word of Pyle’s writings, and with nothing to do that night but listen to the clink of Mrs. Pyle’s ice cubes, he cracked open Ernie’s latest, called
Brave Men.
He read the dedication:

In solemn salute to those thousands of our comrades
—
great, brave men that they were
—
for whom there will be no homecoming, ever.

In a Dead Man’s Hat
85

Oh, Jeez, Wild Bill thought. He sat in bed turning pages till dawn, reading Ernie’s tenderly etched sketches of ordinary soldiers as they lived and died in the great conflict overseas. By morning Wellman was making plans to shoot the picture.

Pyle’s deal with Lester Cowan included certain informal guarantees. He wanted no phony love interest added to the story, and the actor playing Pyle himself had to look “anemic” and “weigh in the neighborhood of 112 pounds.” Without actually putting them on a scale, the producer first considered Fred Astaire for the part and then settled on Burgess Meredith. A screenplay was manufactured by the triumvirate of Leopold Atlas, Philip Stevenson, and Guy Endore (the latter best known as the author of the fiendish novel
The Werewolf of Paris, not
a Pulitzer Prize winner). Then Wellman brought Pyle to Hollywood for a polishing job. “We worked together day after day and it gradually became a great shooting script. Cruel, factual, unaffected, genuine, and with a heart as big as Ernie’s.”

There was no plot and no hero in any conventional Hollywood sense, and no villain—only an inexorable but virtually unseen enemy. Next to Pyle, the white-haired observer of the young Americans’ struggle, the most prominent character was that of Charlie Company’s empathetic commanding officer, Lt. Bill Walker, based like many of the characters on a real person. Wellman was still looking for somebody to play Walker only a matter of weeks before filming, when he and his assistant director, Robert Aldrich, ran into Mitchum on Hollywood Boulevard. He took Mitchum over to Lester Cowan’s office and conducted a bantering interrogation.

“What kind of parts have you done?”

“For two years I’ve been supporting horses—or vice versa.”

“You mean to tell me you haven’t been knocking ‘em dead on Broadway? How tall are you?”

“Six foot or so, I guess.”

“You guess? Don’t you know? Every goddamn midget that comes in here says he’s six feet tall. Alan Ladd is six feet three. What’s the matter with your nose?”

“Nothing. It serves the purpose—I breathe through it.”

Coincidence can sometimes look like destiny: in 1928, Wellman had directed the film version of Jim Tully’s
Beggars of Life,
one of Robert’s favorite books; in 1933, he had directed
Wild Boys of the Road,
about the Depression “road kids,”
and that one could have been Robert’s own story. Cowan got RKO’s permission to test Mitchum for
G.I. Joe.
Wellman told him they would do the long scene between Pyle and Walker, near the end of the script. In the scene, the correspondent comes to see the lieutenant in his tent while he is writing yet another letter to the mother of a soldier killed in battle. Walker, in conversation, reflects on the dreadful job at hand and the waste and absurdity of war. It was the most concentrated and emotional scene Mitchum had ever attempted in the movies.

Clearly aware that this was a big break, the only opportunity at hand to climb out of the B picture ghetto, Mitchum spent all the time he had preparing for the audition, speaking the lines, pondering his approach. He didn’t know much about the war really. He didn’t know anybody to talk to who had been involved. But Julie did. She had met hundreds of GIs while doing her nightclub act around California. Sometimes the places would be packed with nothing but men in uniform. Robert talked to her about the veterans she had met, and Julie told him how she would never see gung ho happy warriors the way you saw them in the movies. The ones who had been in the thick of it, she said, came back withdrawn, exhausted. They had faced down death or seen it get their buddies, and they were sad-faced and depressed, many of them.

They shot the test with no frills, a couple of fill lights aimed on a tiny stage with a Western wagonwheel for a prop. Wellman gave few suggestions. He wanted to see what the wise guy might come up with on his own. So Mitchum played the scene as he thought it would work, speaking the sad lines with a low key, weary anguish. There was a long silence when it was over. Wellman couldn’t speak, forgot to say, “Cut.” He was even more knocked out later when he screened the footage. “I saw something so wonderful, so completely compelling,” he said, “that I was mad at myself for not having built the set so that I could have the test be the actual scene that came out in the picture. He was fantastic.”

Mitchum would say, “I think he was surprised I remembered most of the words, that’s all.”

Cowan went to RKO and made a deal. The loan-out called for a payment of $800 a week for six weeks and second-place billing. Mitchum would receive only his regular $350 weekly salary, and the studio pocketed the profit.

Production got under way in November. Cowan had arranged with the army to obtain the services of more than a hundred active-duty soldiers, most of them veterans of the North African and Italian campaigns depicted in the film.
The director planned to use only these actual combat troops as extras and for all uniformed bit parts. “I made actors out of them,” Wellman said, “and then all the actors had to live with them, drill with them, and learn to be like them.” Actors carried eighty-pound packs all day long and dined on the dreaded K rations. Wellman was pursuing a physical and psychological realism for
G.I. Joe
that would have made von Stroheim proud. Filming began in the Mojave, filling in for coastal Algeria, then moved to rented space at the Selznick studio in Culver City. Old standing sets were ruthlessly reduced to smoking ruins, the cathedral town built for DeMille’s 1928 silent
The Godless Girl
turned into ravaged San Vittorio, where Charlie Company cleans out a nest of invisible snipers. For the long, central sequence of the men trapped interminably in the valley below a fortified monastery, shot on cramped interiors, Wellman had his designers create an ultrarealistic wasteland of rain and muck and cold. The director’s son, William Wellman, Jr., visited his father during the filming and recalled the uncomfortable conditions. “Even for a kid it was no fun to be there, and the actors were all stuck in it all day long. Muddy, wet, a terrible mess to have to work in. My father wanted it to be ‘war is hell’ and it was.”

Eagerly escaping this misery when shooting concluded for the day, Mitchum would head for the nearest tavern, usually accompanied by a number of his fellow “GIs.” Bearded, faces usually still coated in grime, they made quite a spectacle at whatever bars would have them. The distinguished star of the film, Burgess “Buzz” Meredith, turned out to have a powerful thirst. Meredith didn’t see much in Mitchum’s acting at the time—only realizing how strongly the younger man was coming across when he saw the finished film—but found him to be a very agreeable drinking companion, and they closed down many a bar together. “Bob was a swinger—and I was a swinger in those days—we did a lot of funning around outside the set,” Meredith recalled. The fun ended abruptly when his pregnant wife, Paulette Goddard, lost the baby they had both wanted so much. Meredith always remembered how Mitchum helped him through this crisis, “talked to me and tried to help as best he could and I appreciated his kindness.”

Filming on
G.I. Joe
continued into the new year: 1945. New sequences were added as they went along. The episodic nature of the script allowed Wellman to improvise whole sequences and to expand the roles of actors whose work pleased him, as in the case of his Sergeant Warnicki, played by ex-boxer Freddie Steele.

Wellman was a colorful dynamo on his sets, twitching and grabbing his arthritic arms, shouting insults, goosing and screaming at the actors and crew
members, an ebullient version of Brian Donlevy’s sadistic commandant in
Beau Geste,
Wild Bill’s 1939 love song to his beloved Foreign Legion. When he took former middleweight boxing champion Freddie Steele through his big scene as dim-witted Sergeant Warnicki gone mad with battle fatigue, Steele felt like he was back in the ring.

“Once we did that scene,” Steele said. “No good. Twice we did it. It stinks. So, we rest and do it again. Wellman says nix. Don’t I understand? We do it again. He blows up and swears. By this time I’m getting tired and I’m getting sore. We do it again. He gets sarcastic. We do it again and he blows his top. ‘You slaphappy so-and-so. Maybe you shouldn’t have had that last fight!’ That’s nothing to say to a fighter, see? If I didn’t have to do the scene again, I’d have socked him one. We did it again and that Wellman kisses me and says, ‘That’s what I wanted.’

“That so-and-so is a wonderful guy. . . .”

Mitchum required none of Wellman’s theatrics to get him through the part of Bill Walker. As with the screen test, the director needed only to give him the encouragement and the space to show what he could do. The result was a performance that was like nothing Mitchum had ever done on film before. His Lieutenant Walker lived and breathed, the humanity and psychic pain of the soldier palpable things, not screenwriters’ constructs. It was a small part—
G.I. Joe
was an ensemble piece, and not even Meredith’s Ernie Pyle got to dominate the screen for long—but Mitchum’s one good scene was the emotional and philosophical core of the film. In a virtual soliloquy, his worn-down lieutenant struggles with little success to find some meaning in all the death and destruction surrounding him, his face a haunted mask of resignation and despair. An intimate and tender scene, its impact increases in retrospect as it serves as Lieutenant Walker’s last testament. His eventual—it feels inevitable—death in combat occurs offscreen. The body is brought down from the battlefield in the mountains, gracelessly strapped to the back of a mule. Wellman staged a Calvary of shattering sadness: the soldiers of Charlie Company straggling up to pay their last respects to their beloved lieutenant (now a captain), touching his hand or his cheek, muttering their farewells (”I sure am sorry, sir . . .”), the seasoned warriors turned childlike in their bereavement.