Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (21 page)

“My close acquaintances,” Mitchum told her, “—that’s four people—keep asking me where I am, who I am, and I tell them I’m an open book. But they all say, oh no, that I’m an island, an island they can’t find. . . . I’m not anyone else’s property, am I? All life is spent in obeisance to the id.”

“Who’s your closest friend?” Wilkie asked against the buffeting wind.

“I don’t have one.”

“Come on. Someone in the family?”

“My family is baffled.”

“Do you baffle yourself?”

“Hell, no. I have the key.”

That night in Avalon, after they had put the kids to bed, Bob and Dorothy
strolled barefoot to Santa Catalina’s famous bandstand. The band played “To Each His Own” and the couple danced in the moonlight.
The Gentle Approach
made local history as the first play ever performed on the island. The fan magazine photographer shot the Mitchums posing before Catalina seascapes and in front of the Avalon Theater, and snapped Bob in the racy, curtain-closing moment when he hoisted DeWitt over his shoulder, held her around the thighs, and stalked offstage to conjugal bliss; but by the time these appeared,
The Gentle Approach
was ancient history, and no one else from Hollywood appears to have caught the play in its brief run or come away proclaiming Mitchum’s talent as a farceur. It was his last appearance on a “legit” stage. The Theater Production Guild was never heard from again.

Pursued
was the brainchild of Niven Busch, a journalist turned screenwriter and more recently a successful novelist (
Till the End of Time
had been based on his book
They Dream of Home).
After years of hackwork in Hollywood, working on assignment, Busch was now dedicated to controlling his own film projects. He entered into a partnership with Milton Sperling, a Warner Bros, son-in-law who headed quasi-independent United States Pictures with the brothers’ indulgence. A few years before, Busch had wandered around the Southwest gathering lore. It was a trip that had inspired the writing of his novel
Duel in the Sun
and now—
Pursued.
In El Paso, Texas, he read an old newspaper story about a blood-soaked feud between two families and a young boy who had survived to be brought up by the family that had destroyed his own. Busch thought, “Jesus, what was the fate of that little boy? He’s going into a family that has killed his parents and his relatives . . . a wonderful classic springboard.” Busch envisioned a Greek tragedy out West, familial curses and inescapable destiny. The screenplay contained more modern influences, too, interpolating newly popularized Freudian concepts like childhood trauma, repressed memory, primal fantasy. The finished script was so unusual, so richly, weirdly detailed, with its one-armed villain, whiffs of incest, hallucinations, and fragmented dream sequences, that the assigned director, Raoul Walsh, asked Busch to stay nearby during shooting and be ready to tell him what the hell was going on.

Pursued is
the story of Jeb Rand, a boy saved from the horrifying site of his family’s massacre by Medora Callum, who raises him as her own with her son, Adam, and daughter, Thorley. Grown up, psychically haunted, and, he comes to realize, physically hunted by his father’s murderers led by the obsessed Judge Grant Callum (Medora’s former brother-in-law), Jeb is doomed to follow a
path strewn with tragedy and destruction, killing his adoptive brother and marrying the “sister” who is plotting to shoot him on their wedding night. Finally, on the verge of being lynched by his pursuers, Jeb’s life is again saved by Medora, her long-ago adulterous affair with his father at last revealed as the cause of the blood feud.

The film’s leading lady was a given, as Busch had written the part of Thorley for his wife, the incandescent Teresa Wright. To play Jeb Rand, Busch wanted a strong, new actor, someone the audience couldn’t immediately identify as a conventional hero. From the New York stage, Montgomery Clift was brought out for a screen test. Posed in cowboy gear, Clift was thought to look ridiculous and quickly sent home (ironically, he later achieved stardom with another Western role in
Red River).
Newcomer Kirk Douglas was impressive in his test, but Jack Warner was repulsed by the cleft in his chin. Someone suggested Robert Mitchum—Warner considered
his
cleft acceptable. Busch was not too keen at first, but Mitchum looked great on film and the writer-producer soon became an ardent admirer of the actor’s talent. The deal to borrow Mitchum was made with Selznick’s Vanguard Pictures, whose periodic ownership of the actor’s services was currently in play. The acclaimed Australian actress Judith Anderson—frightening Mrs. Danvers in
Rebecca
—was cast as Jeb’s ambivalent “mother,” and Mitchum’s
When Strangers Marry
castmate Dean Jagger would play the relentless Grant Callum.

To give the film the dark, violently dramatic images the story demanded, the producers hired one of Hollywood’s most talented and adventurous cinematographers, James Wong Howe. As for the director, the material would seem to have called for a past master of fatalism such as Fritz Lang or an up-and-coming specialist in violent neuroses like Anthony Mann. Instead the assignment went to Warners house director Raoul Walsh, a roguish old cowboy from Manhattan, maker of nearly a hundred movies since 1914 (including
What Price Glory? The Big Trail,
and
The Roaring Twenties)
and probably one of the least neurotic men in Hollywood. His most personal characteristics as a filmmaker were a lusty humor and an improvisatory naturalism. The humorless portentousness of
Pursued
hardly looked like his sort of thing on the face of it, but Raoul had done every possible type of film in his long career, and if the new trend was for dark, anxiety-filled movies, he could do those, too.

Walsh and Mitchum got along well (the director would later call him “one of the finest natural actors I ever met”). Mitchum enjoyed the old pro immensely. He looked like a pirate with his big, black eyepatch—orb lost years ago when a jackrabbit jumped through his windshield as he was driving to a desert location—and acted a bit like one, too. He had a glint in the remaining
eye that ladies found irresistible, and there seemed to be a different big-bottomed blonde sitting on his lap for every day of the week. Walsh’s approach to directing was so relaxed it bordered on the disinterested and sometimes crossed right over the border. He would often turn his back or wander off during a take, more concerned with coordinating his pouch of tobacco and his rolling papers than in watching the actors. “He would roll cigarettes with one hand on the blind side,” Mitchum recalled. “And as he was walking away from the set the tobacco would fall out, and he would light it and—phew! Roll another one, light it—phew! Finally there would be a protracted silence, and he would say, ‘Is it over? Okay, cut. What’s next?’

“He never even watched,” said Mitchum. “But he was marvelous, he had great confidence in everybody, so if you told him it was good, that was fine.” Walsh lost his easygoing demeanor only when one of his team threatened to take this moviemaking business too seriously. Walsh considered Niven Busch “an eccentric” who “literally fell in love with his scripts.” The writer, standing on the set to explain “what the hell was going on,” gushed in such detail that the director could bear no more, crying, “Good God! Stop it, that’s enough!” He also showed considerable irritation with James Wong Howe (though the two had worked well together in the past) and his complicated, time-consuming, lighting setups. “He knew what a great cameraman Jimmy was,” said Niven Busch, “but he didn’t give a shit about camera art.”

Walsh would grumble, “The goddamn Chink is going to put us behind schedule.”

Twenty-five-year-old Harry Carey, Jr., had appeared briefly in one B movie before signing on for the role of Prentice McComber, Thorley’s doomed fiance in
Pursued
(two appearances that did not keep John Ford from claiming to have introduced him to the movies in the credits of the later
Three Godfathers).
Carey’s father was one of the original screen cowboys, and Junior, known to friends as Dobe, had been around movie actors and stars all his life. But Dobe did not think he had ever seen anyone, on or off the screen, quite like Robert Mitchum. “It’s over fifty years later,” Carey said, “and I still haven’t met another guy like that in my life. He was just an overwhelming personality. Big. Powerful looking. I mean, I knew Duke Wayne, and Mitchum at that time was a much more overpowering figure than Duke Wayne was, no question. And Mitchum—I don’t know if they even had the word then—but Mitchum was
cool.
If they didn’t have that expression he must have invented it, because he was just the coolest guy that ever lived. He had his own outlook on life and he
didn’t let anyone interfere with it. Totally opposite from me. I remember we’d be sitting in his dressing room doing nothing and there would be some commotion on the set like they were ready, and I was so eager I’d jump up to go on the soundstage. And Bob would say, ‘Where you going?’ I’d say, ‘Well, they might need me.’ And he’d say, ‘Fuck ‘em! They got little guys they send over to tell you that. That’s their
job,
man!’

“Bob wasn’t arrogant, don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of people in this business who like you to kiss their feet, and Mitchum wasn’t one of them. He was the least starlike movie star you could imagine. He didn’t care anything about that, how things might look to other people. Bob had that background, wandering around on the road, and I think part of him always remained kind of a tramp. I used to drive him home from the Warners lot every day when we were making that picture. He’d had his license taken away, so he couldn’t drive and needed a lift home. I had a 1937 Olds, a ten-year-old heap. Here’s the star of this Warner Bros, movie, bumming a ride, climbs into an old jalopy. Didn’t give it a thought. He’d tell me to let him out at a spot off Ventura Boulevard, and he’d walk the rest of the way. I can still see him there, by himself, hiking his way up into the hills.”

At the studio, Carey—”I had the look of a fellow who had never even kissed a girl, let alone gone to bed with one”—observed with awe Mitchum’s effect on the opposing gender. “He was big and powerful and handsome in a different way. Sex appeal and then some. And the women just sort of went crazy for him. Not that he was—how did they used to say—a pussy hound. He didn’t chase it, just sort of a sideline. Never on the make. If it’s there, take it; if not, the hell with it. But he had this aura—like he’d been to bed with hundreds of women. And I mean it made some women nervous to be around him.”

According to Carey, Teresa Wright was foremost among those made nervous by Mitchum’s erotic
aura.
“Bob scared her. She found him physically overpowering, and with that sort of bad boy sexuality, she just became out of sorts when he was near her. It was a strange thing to see. She was married to Niven Busch, the guy who wrote the thing, and she had been around in movies for years, but I guess she was very naive in some ways. And it wasn’t put on; it was real. Teresa Wright, the little leading lady, she became terrified of him. She was scared to death, afraid he was going to do something to her, tear her down and rape her or something. And Bob was not that kind of guy.”

The director and some of the other men found Teresa Wright’s sexual anxiety quite amusing. Raoul Walsh loved a good practical joke—as the story went, he had once borrowed John Barrymore’s corpse from a funeral parlor to give a drunken Errol Flynn a good scare. On this occasion he and Busch and
Mitchum dreamed up a gag. It was the wedding night scene, Jeb carrying Thorley over the threshhold. The scene was rehearsed and ready to shoot when Walsh told Mitchum to take her to the bed and “make like you’re jumping her bones. Hold her down and start trying to rape her.”

The camera turned, and Mitchum carried the petite Teresa onto the set, but instead of lowering her to the ground, he tossed her onto the bed and crawled all over her. Wright screamed in terror.

“It was kind of cruel,” said Carey, “because they scared the hell out of her before they let her know it was a gag.”

The completed film was a strange, original, extraordinary work. Its grave yet delirious romanticism played like
Wuthering Heights
transplanted to a gun-slingers’ New Mexico (Raoul Walsh giving to this film the feverishness absent from William Wyler’s prosaic version of the Bronte novel), while the fractured storytelling, violence, and shadow-haunted images strikingly introduced film noir to the Old West. James Wong Howe’s photography, Fordian deep focus for the stark, high desert location footage, noirish underlighting, and low angles for the interiors, was—for a Western
certainly
—imposing and experimental (Howe’s innovations included the first use of infrared film in a Hollywood production). Flanking Mitchum’s central role, Judith Anderson was expectably powerful as the steely and tortured mother, and Teresa Wright, a testimonial to nepotism, was sublime—few actresses in film history could so enticingly express romantic yearning and vulnerability.

For Mitchum,
Pursued
was yet another proving ground. Though he had made four features since
G.I. Joe
thrust him into the big time, this was his first real lead in an A production. And it was a performance, and a role, requiring a dramatic leap beyond the behavioral naturalism of his previous characterizations. Jeb Rand, as written, was a ripely melodramatic part—the character is, after all, literally haunted by ghosts from his past—erupting with outbursts of passion, fear, and violence. Mitchum compellingly adapted the part to his own strengths, playing down the hysteria in the material—one could imagine a very different approach from Kirk Douglas—giving a kind of voluptuous passivity to Rand’s enigmatic resignation in the face of a malignant, seemingly inexorable fate. The part was Mitchum’s first romantic lead, and the actor was presented in a way guaranteed to set the bobby-soxers’ hearts racing: an alluring object of desire, a figure of power and sensuality with his heavy-lidded, “immoral face,” the glistening dark pompadoured hair, the massive physique towering over the low-angled camera, and an unusually flamboyant wardrobe
(puffy-sleeved white shirts, extravagant Indian blanket coat). Mitchum’s brooding, darkly sexual characterization in
Pursued
would anticipate the supposedly groundbreaking style brought to the screen by Marlon Brando and later still by Elvis Presley.