Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (2 page)

He scoffed at this shallow public persona, the hell-raiser, the lout, the outlaw, even as he supplied new tales of anarchy, fresh outbursts of iconoclasm to every cub reporter in line for an interview. In fact, the popular image revealed only the surface of a more complicated, mostly hidden reality, leaving unexamined the man Mitchum’s contradictions and unpredictabilities, his secret selves—Mitchum the poet, the autodidact, the lyric philosopher, the left-wing firebrand, far-right crank, depressed loner, harried husband. A man of many parts, few people ever saw or claimed to know how all the pieces came together, not even those who knew him best. “My family is baffled. My close acquaintances—that’s four people—keep asking me where I am, who I am. . . .

“No. . . . Oh, no,” said a long-time professional confidante, “you’ll never understand that. I don’t know that anyone ever did.”

He was a movie star for more than half a century, staying at the job longer than almost anybody, career ebbing and flowing, counted out more than once and then coming back big as ever.
El Dorado. Ryan’s Daughter. The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Farewell, My Lovely. The Winds of War.
The colossal presence, the often brilliant performances, were delivered, as always, without visible fuss. It was a job of work, movie acting, he always said, like plumbing or fixing a car, only with more makeup. His celestial place in the scheme of things cinematic became all the more apparent as the golden age talent pool faded into the sunset. “He’s the only Gary Cooper still alive,” said the
Winds
producer. People knew what it meant. They didn’t make ’em like that anymore. Mitchum was one of a kind and the last of the breed. His stature, his legend, grew even as the jobs he took became unworthy and threadbare. “You don’t get to do better,” he liked to say, “you only get to do more.” Shambling into his seventies, he remained, whatever the crummy project, the movies’ supreme outsider, great sad-eyed adventurer, bitterly funny pessimist.

Reporter: “Mr. Mitchum, do you think you will become a cult hero, say, in the 1990s, like Bogart in the 1960s?”

Mitchum: “What year is it now, Jack?”

In an era when movie actors cried like schoolgirls if you gave them an award or whined to caring talk-show hostesses if they took too many drugs, Mitchum’s mythic presence, an image of beatific stoicism, grace under fire,
wry unflappability in the face of life’s ever-threatening absurdities, looked all the more majestic and ineffably cool. In the end, when the doctors came and tried to tell him how he had to live his life so as not to die, they found the patient would not cooperate but had bought into the myth himself, as if it were real.

H
IS FATHER WAS A
tough son of a bitch, he would say proudly.

The blood of early Scots-Irish settlers and American Indians ran in the veins of James Thomas Mitchum. He hailed from the town of Lane in eastern South Carolina, a small, slim young man with a lean, handsome face and sly, expressive dark eyes. People who knew him remembered a man of much charm and humor, physically strong out of all proportion to his slender frame. He liked a good fight. His fierceness was legendary among those who gathered together to pass around a bottle. The wildness that came with the drinking, people ascribed, as per the prejudicial thinking of the time, to his Indian heritage. Indians, even half-breeds, everybody knew, were drawn to liquor even though the stuff made them lose their minds. Only a fool would challenge Jimmy Mitchum to a fight, but there were always fools to be found in the backcountry of South Carolina as in every other part of the world. When he was seventeen—the first son would speak of this—he was said to have killed a man in a brawl in a place called Hellhole Swamp.

He went into the service, leaving the rural South for the first time in his life. A private in the U.S. Army, he came to be stationed in Connecticut, and it was there, in the port of New London, that the young man met a girl, a pretty, sad-faced Norwegian immigrant named Ann Harriet Gunderson. She was the daughter of a sea captain. Gustav Olaf Gunderson of Christiania, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, nearly three hundred pounds, had sailed the merciless waters of the North Atlantic and the Barents Sea far above the Arctic Circle. Among the ocean fishermen of Norway there were weird tales told
about this giant, powerful man. Once, long ago, a ship he skippered had gone down in a terrible storm. The captain and four crewmen had escaped on a lifeboat, but only Gunderson was still aboard when a rescue ship found him weeks later, looking little the worse for his ordeal. A court of inquiry said that questions remained unanswered. A lurid rumor followed Gunderson—that he had survived by consuming the flesh of his own shipmates.

The captain had a wife, Petrine, a tiny but strong-willed woman, a refined and learned mate for the tough sea rover. Without help for much of each year while Gustav roamed the world, it was Petrine who brought up their three children: son, Charles, daughters Gertrude and Ann Harriet. From the time she was a little girl, Mrs. Gunderson daydreamed of a life on the stage, and she would nurture in her kids a great appreciation of music and books and paintings, a love of art, of beautiful things. Petrine’s girls sang, played musical instruments, drew, and painted. And son, Charlie, too, built like his father and like him to become a merchant sailor, loved music and performing and as a boy hoped to grow up to be a song-and-dance man.

Early in the new century the Gunderson family joined the great wave of European migrants crossing the ocean to America. They settled among their fellow “squareheads” in coastal Connecticut, first in New London and then in Bridgeport, a thriving manufacturing center along Long Island Sound at the mouth of the Pequonnock River, a short rail journey north of New York City. In the new homeland the Gundersons resumed a life not so different from what it had been in Norway. Papa returned to the sea, a merchant sailor, gone for weeks and months at a time, and Petrine was left to run the house and raise the family. Young Ann Harriett knew no English when she arrived at Ellis Island, but she had a good mind and studied hard and graduated from high school with honors. One weekend, not long after graduation, she went with her sister to the annual regatta in New London, and there, in her prettiest summer dress, she met a young man. Jimmy Mitchum was handsome and funny and strong. She fell in love. It was the inescapable impulse of the genteel, intelligent Gunderson women to fall for strong, simple men. Sister Gertrude was the same—she had found her own beau, an itinerant wrestler from Quebec.

In the spring of 1913, twenty-year-old Ann and twenty-two-year-old James were wed, and in July of the following year the couple had their first child, a girl they named Annette. The young family lived a life of no special concern. They were happy. Jimmy was a restless, vital character but without any particular ambition in life. He moved them all down to South Carolina for a time, but soon they were back in Bridgeport, living in the big East End house at 476 Logan Street. Sister Gertrude by now had married her own peripatetic scrapper, Wilfred Jean Tetreault. Her new husband had not been able to make a living
as a wrestler, and he had not been able to do much else, but Gertie adored him. Jim and Bill became pals, roistering comrades in the watering holes of Connecticut. The pair had a standing challenge at every tavern—they would take on any three comers, any time, any place. Sometimes, when there were no challengers, they went ahead and found them anyway.

On August 6, 1917, at the house in Bridgeport, Ann gave birth to her second child, a blond-haired, hazel-eyed boy. Baptized by the minister from the Newfield Methodist Church, the boy was named Robert Charles Durman Mitchum. He was a taciturn baby—unsmiling in all family photos—and with somber, torpid eyes that attracted much comment. He fell on his head as a small child, and a doctor told the mother her boy showed signs of brain damage. “You can see it in the eyes,” the doctor said. “No, that’s the way they’ve always been,” said Ann.

Soon the young Mrs. Mitchum was expecting again. “One day when my mother was pregnant with John,” Robert would recall in years ahead, “she was on a trolley car and this conductor was harassing her, pushing her to the rear, and my father picked him up and threw him right through the window, jumped out after him and stomped his brains out. He had to leave town.”

James Mitchum took his family and returned to the South. They settled in Charleston and he found a job in the port at the military railhead. The end of World War I and the return of personnel and equipment from Europe had put a considerable strain on these transportation centers. There was unending activity in the navy yard where James Mitchum did wearying labor, coupling and uncoupling and helping to shunt the steady streams of heavy freight cars. It was dangerous work. Hardly a day went by without a man mangling a foot or breaking a finger or an arm disentangling those big wooden cars, wrestling the heavy metal couplings with their slivers like tiny daggers that entered the flesh even through thick gloves. Many times, heading off for work, Jimmy Mitchum would tell his wife, “One of these days, Annie, they’re going to bring me home in a box.”

One February night in 1919, at the Charleston navy yard, Mitchum was standing on a track siding between two boxcars, completing the manual operation of disconnecting one from the other. He had shouted the all clear to a brakeman who had signaled the engineer to haul away. There was no explanation for what happened next. Mixed signals, mechanical error, stupidity. No one would ever be held accountable. It was simply a tragic mistake, an inevitability when men worked among giant, inexorable machines. The train engine started, the boxcar jerked to life. Jimmy Mitchum thought it was pulling
forward as expected and he glanced away. But the engine was in reverse and the cars suddenly rolled back. A foot to the left or right and another moment to realize what had happened and there might have been space and time to escape the impact of one car rolling against another. Instead he stood there, caught directly between the solid iron couplers, taking the full weight on flesh and bone. His skeleton shattered. His insides burst and their hematic content exploded from mouth and nose and eyes. The brakeman screamed for help, and men in the yard rushed over to drag him clear, and they carried him indoors and someone went for a doctor, and someone else went to find the injured man’s wife. He was still alive when she got there. Ann cradled the broken form in her arms and, weeping on his bloodstained body, she held him like that for some time after he was gone.

A widow at twenty-five. Two children, another on the way. In compensation for her husband’s death, the government awarded Mrs. Mitchum an eighteen-dollar-a-month pension. Ann stayed for a time in Jim’s hometown of Lane, then, uncomfortable among the small town strangers, gathered her possessions and kids and returned to her own family in Connecticut. The baby was not yet two years old, but he had perceived the sadness all around him. On the train ride north he was inconsolable, cried all the time, mother and sister would remember. He had been just old enough to feel the imprint of his father’s presence and then to feel his absence, and he would carry a sense of loss and abandonment into childhood and beyond.

Ann nursed her grief through the spring and summer. On September 6 the widow gave birth to a boy she named John Newman Mitchum.

She began her life again. Family members did what they could to help out. Some relatives offered more than Ann desired. “Uncle Bill Tetreault, the wrestler, Gertrude’s monster,” Annette recalled, “he was not a scholar and a gentleman. He made passes at Mother, always putting his hands on her. She told him to stop. We all told him to stop. One time she emptied a full coffeepot with grounds all over his head. That stopped him for then, but he came back and started with the hands on her again. Once she grabbed up a big wad of flypaper and plastered it onto his balding head.”

The simpleminded chauvinism of the day painted a widow with much of
the same scarlet color attached to a divorcee. A single woman who had experienced sexual relations—the fact of it alone was enough to provoke certain men. Finding a new husband seemed a good idea. She met a man, a jaunty New York Irishman named Bill Clancy. He worked as a newspaper reporter, though as Robert would recall it, the man had other pursuits. He remembered Clancy and some tough guys meeting in the kitchen after midnight, muffled voices. Bootleggers, said Bob. It was a growth industry in any port in those Prohibition days. One way or another the man was not unacquainted with the illegal liquid. On his good days he was a funny, happy fellow with a talent for writing lighthearted and sentimental verse, but he was a drunkard, and the drink turned him angry and violent. One night he went berserk, tearing their house apart and then turning his rage on Ann. “One of my earliest remembrances,” wrote John Mitchum, “was coming home with Bob to a dark and empty house, its windows broken out, its doors shattered. Neighbors talked in subdued whispers of Clancy’s attempt to kill Mother, who had fled for her life.”