Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (19 page)

“If some reporter asked him a stupid question, he told them it was a stupid question,” said Edward Dmytryk. “You weren’t supposed to do that. You were supposed to put up a front, you know. Smile and tell them how great everything was. But he was a cynic. He couldn’t make himself do that stuff. And he loved to pull the legs of these interviewers, to shock them. One old lady said to him, ‘What is your favorite pastime, Mr. Mitchum?’ I won’t tell you what he answered, but it stopped her dead.”

Colloquies between stars and reporters were generally formal affairs arranged by the studio and were looked at as an adjunct to their publicity department’s own fantasy-spinning. Savvy careerists like Joan Crawford or Cary Grant approached them as public performances even when they took place in their own homes, as opportunities to present a predetermined image of doting mother or grinning poolside playboy. Many columnists and fan mag journalists used to these posed, nearly scripted encounters clearly found Mitchum’s seemingly unguarded authenticity refreshing. Appreciative pieces spoke of his “free style,” his “brilliant sense of independence and individuality,” his “provocative and impudent conversation.” Reporters visiting him at his house would find no servants, stylists, or handlers, only the star, barefoot in jeans and T-shirt, ready to say whatever crossed his mind. Of course, Mitchum as rugged antistar was a marketable image, too, and his behavior before the press might well have contained as much calculation as Crawford’s Mother of the Year act. Nonetheless, there was an unprecedented iconoclasm to many of Mitchum’s remarks in these earliest press pieces. Years before Brando and the age of the Angry Young Actor, Mitchum was going on record disdaining the Hollywood establishment, calling producers liars, and saying of his pictures, as he did to Ruth Waterbury in
Photoplay,
“The dialogue in most of them is so bad, you have to spit it out like dirt in your teeth.”

In his private life he made no big star friendships, preferring to hang out with old pals like Tony Caruso and low-level industry workers he befriended—gaffers, stuntmen, extras. His few “name” cronies were on the far fringes of
stardom, denizens of the night brought together by their taste for booze and other substances, brawling roisterers like Bruce Cabot and J. Carrol “Joe” Naish (the oily character actor, in real life a rabid and surprisingly successful womanizer) and fellow hipster John Ireland (Shelley Winters recalled watching the two young men hilariously smoking a reefer under a table at Lucey’s, a hangout near RKO and Paramount, then Mitchum taking off with Ireland’s steak and twenty of his dollars). Army buddies from the days at Fort MacArthur looked him up when they came through town and were given sleeping space on the living room floor, staying until someone in the family would ask them to move along. With the better part of two households depending on his weekly paycheck, there never seemed anything left for savings or extravagances, and for some time Mitchum’s lifestyle remained modest in the extreme.

Henry Rackin, a production assistant whose father and uncle had worked at RKO, became friendly with Bob shortly after they both got out of the service in 1945. One day on the set of
Till the End of Time
he found Mitchum contemplating nearby Guy Madison, who was being made much of for his blond, sexy looks. “I’m going to change the title of this picture,” Mitchum growled.

“To what?”

“Beauty and the Beast.”

Rackin went to visit him at the house on Palm Avenue. “It was right below the Sunset Strip, a little rundown bungalow with a big backyard in what was a seedy neighborhood at that time, and they didn’t have a dime to their names. Dorothy, his wife, was walking around in an old cotton dress. He said they couldn’t afford underwear. So whatever money he was making, it was gone. I said, ‘Hi, where’s Bob?’ and she told me he was in the backyard. And I went around back, and there he was with some tin cans with dirt in them, and he was dropping water out of an eyedropper. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m growing my seeds.’ Marijuana.” Contrary to the RKO publicity bio, Mitchum did enjoy a little gardening.

He went out drinking and barhopping most nights, and for a time Rackin accompanied him as the designated driver. “I would meet him at a bar. He had a whole list of favorite places. There was one he liked on Sunset and Gardner where he would usually start. And I would meet him there, and then we’d get in my car and go to various other spots. I was really a chauffeur for him. And I was the only one of his friends his wife could tolerate for a while. I was never a big drinker, and she thought there was a good chance I could get him back home. She would say, ‘I don’t care how late he’s out, just so he comes back.’”

With a handful of drinking buddies gathered around at one watering hole or another, Mitchum would hold court, telling rowdy stories and keeping his pals in stitches. “He had a wicked sense of humor,” said Rackin. “He would tell story after story, and he did many of them in character. He did a great impersonation of a gay guy, a real swish, and people would sit around roaring with laughter. And he was a great connoisseur of ‘Rastas’ stories, and he would tell them like he was imitating Stepin Fetchit. I know that’s not the greatest picture in the world of black people, but I never heard him say anything derogatory about black people. You heard all these Polish stories, too, and I’m Polish and used to laugh like hell.”

Some of Bob’s buddies, particularly the stuntmen, were tough to an absurd degree and loved to prove it. One time they formed a circle on the barroom floor—all of them pie-eyed—trying to win a bet or something, and one guy standing there would punch the guy next to him, and that guy would hit the guy next to him, and around in a circle, and the last one standing won the bet. Jaws were broken, fingers were broken, blood everywhere. Good times.

By law the bars in LA had to close at twelve midnight in those days. Dedicated drinkers were just getting started by that hour, and to accommodate them a network of illegal after-hours joints sprang up at scattered addresses in Hollywood and downtown LA. Some were in basements and back rooms in the commecial districts, some were in private residences, like the mansion on Normandy above Wilshire where you had to say a password into a slit in the door, like at an old speakeasy. Some offered only setups, you brought your own bottle, but others peddled drinks, drugs, and whatever else your after-midnight heart desired. Mitchum knew them all. “One night,” said Henry Rackin, “Bob says, ‘I want to go to Brothers.’ It was a place he had talked about. It was downtown, in a very bad neighborhood. He said, ‘Let’s go.’ I said, ‘Fine. Show me how to get there.’ And we drove down there. It was a bad area, and you had to walk down a dark alley between two buildings. I was scared to death. And we came to a door and Bob talked to the guy at the door and they let us in. It was a terrible place, a toilet, hardly any light and it was dense with smoke, and the smell of marijuana made you woozy. There was a bar, people drinking, but a lot of them were smoking. People were sitting on the floor, along the walls. And Bob says, ‘I have to go to the John, order us a couple of drinks.’ And he was gone awhile, and when he came back he was screaming, ‘I don’t believe it, somebody stole my wallet!’ So I was stuck with the bill.”

On February 2, 1946, Charles Koerner, who had given RKO its most profitable years, died of leukemia, leaving the studio once more in search of a production
chief and setting the stage for the bizarre final chapter in the company’s history. Corporate president N. Peter Rathvon filled the post in the interim.

For his performance in
The Story of G.I. Joe,
Robert Mitchum was nominated for the Best Supporting Actor award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Oscar went to James Dunn, heartbreaking as the doomed, happy-go-lucky father in
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

“Hell, even I voted for Jimmy Dunn,” said Mitchum. “The Academy,” he liked to point out in the decades ahead, “never messed with me again.”

Brother John Mitchum had gotten out of the service after nearly three years. He had not been sent into battle, but he had certainly done his share of fighting, in Florida, Hawaii, and elsewhere. A brawl with an officer had gotten him railroaded into the brig, and on a happier note, he’d won an assortment of boxing championships for his regiment. He returned to Los Angeles with a plan to study for a career in music under the GI Bill. When he had gone away, his brother was a struggling B movie bit player. Now Bob was a movie star. John had seen
G.I. Joe
in a crowded theater where he was stationed, and it filled him with pride. But back in Robert’s orbit in LA, the difference in their status made for a certain added tension in the relationship. Bob’s constant complaining about the way the studio took advantage of him wore on John’s nerves. He was trying to make ends meet on a ninety-dollar monthly government stipend. One night, John told Mike Tomkies, Bob was waving around a check from RKO, squawking about how much tax had been withheld or something.

“Why don’t you shut up?” John told him. “You’re whining like a child. There are people coming back from the war with one leg, no legs . . . and here you are, bitching about losing a little money. . . .”

At that Robert hauled off and slugged him.

“We had both been drinking, of course,” John said. “He hit me right in the head, and that started it. We fought so hard we did two thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the den—and he’d just fixed it all up. . . . It could have got a lot worse, but Dorothy finally stepped in and stopped us.”

Robert had not won an Oscar, but as they say, “It was great just to be nominated,” and he—or his contract holders at any rate—profited from the honor as the Academy nod spurred other studios to make big-money offers for his services. MGM was one—paying twenty-five-thousand dollars per performance
for two films shooting back to back that spring: a suspenser titled
Undercurrent
and a romantic melodrama with a wartime background variously referred to as
Sacred and Profane, A Woman of His Own, A Woman of My Own, Carl and Anna, Karl and Anna,
and, finally,
Desire Me.

But first RKO rushed him into something of their own,
The Locket
(called
What Nancy Wanted
during production), starring Laraine Day and produced by Bert Granet.

“Men worshipped . . . Cursed . . . Hated . . . Loved Her!”
moaned the ads.

Evil women were all the rage in 1946, and
The Locket’s
Nancy was the latest addition to a growing noir sisterhood, whose ranks included the femmes fatales of
Double Indemnity, Leave Her to Heaven, Scarlet Street, Woman in the Window,
and
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.
Obsessed and psychologically twisted by the humiliations she’d suffered as a little girl, the bewitching adult Nancy is a daring kleptomaniac whose criminal behavior drives numerous men to madness and suicide. Mitchum was cast as one of the latter, a bohemian painter with a photogenic New York atelier who takes a swan dive through a skyscraper window after Nancy gets done with him. Olivia De Havilland wanted the lead, but producer Bert Granet’s friendship with Laraine Day overruled box office considerations—it would turn out to be Day’s best part and the most interesting performance of her career. In addition to Mitchum, the major male roles went to Brian Aherne as a psychiatrist and Gene Raymond as Nancy’s would-be groom. To direct, the producer borrowed John Brahm from 20th Century-Fox. “At Fox,” said Granet, “he had done a very good suspense picture about Jack the Ripper called
The Lodger.
He was a German—but not too German—and I thought he would be good to direct this and give it some of that same atmosphere he had in
The Lodger.
And we had Nick Musuraca, a marvelous cameraman.”

The film is best remembered today, somewhat derisively, for its extensive use of the flashback. This narrative device had become popular, particularly in the densely layered film noirs (four of Mitchum’s next five films, in various genres, would make extensive use of flashbacks).
The Locket
took things to extremes with, at one point, a flashback going into a flashback going into a flashback. “That complexity was really what enticed me to the material,” said Granet. “It was like an enigma within an enigma within an enigma. It was an enticing script by Sheridan Gibney . . . maybe more so than the picture.”

Mitchum did what the producer thought was a great job in the film and caused no problems. Granet remembered it as a happy time. One Sunday everyone in the cast, including Bob plus Mrs. Mitchum, went up to Brahm’s small horse ranch in Malibu, and on another weekend they were all invited to
dinner at the home of Gene Raymond, where his wife, Jeanette MacDonald, entertained. But there was some tension on the set. Though Mitchum and Laraine Day had been friendly when they knew each other in Long Beach and at the Players Guild, during the shooting of
The Locket
he wanted nothing to do with her. Day claimed she’d been pleased to hear that her old Long Beach colleague was cast in the film and thought his performance marvelous, but when she approached him off camera he cut her dead. Years later Laraine would hear that Bob was nursing a grudge: that he believed she had snubbed him once, at Schwab’s drugstore, when she had made it in movies but he was still a nobody. How funny! Day had thought he’d acted so strange because of the dope he was taking.

A stylish collection of suits, sports jackets, and tuxedo was created for Mitchum to wear in the film. They were clothes like nothing he had ever had in his own wardrobe and he decided to keep them. Someone from the studio demanded he send them back. Mitchum bristled at the humbling request. Other stars got to keep their wardrobe, why couldn’t he? With some consternation, the studio’s Jack Gross came back and told him they would do as they had done with Cary Grant and let him keep the wardrobe for the token payment of one dollar, for accounting purposes. Mitchum told him he wouldn’t pay it. “I stole the clothes. Tell that to the accountant.”

And on to MGM.