Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (35 page)

Robin Ford’s probation hearing was scheduled for January 27. On the night of February 26, Ford and a man described only as “a well-known musician” were driving away from a Sunset Strip nightclub when a pair of narcotics officers pulled them over. The cops claimed they discovered a stick of marijuana in Ford’s hip pocket, and he was arrested. A reporter found him nervous and pale-faced, sitting alone in the narcotics squad headquarters at City Hall. Mitchum’s pal said, “Guess I’m just a bad-luck charm for everybody.”

•  •  •

On the last day of January, Robert Mitchum showed up at the office of attorney Leonard Wilson to answer the damage claim of actress Nanette Bordeaux. The LA
Mirror
was there to give the play-by-play:

“If the kid’s looking for a screen job, I hope this will get it for her. A publicity stunt? Could be?” shrugged the bobby soxers’ pride. “What do you think?”

As casual as though he were shoving a movie villain over a cliff, Mitchum and his civil attorney Martin Gang appeared for filing of the deposition this morning. The gist of his statement was that (1) he had only been in Miss Bordeaux’s house once and thus couldn’t have damaged her furniture and (2) he not only couldn’t have but didn’t.

Having thus deposed, Mitchum made one of his characteristic slump-shouldered exits, to the tune of Gang’s stern warning to the press—”Absolutely no pictures with cigarets!”

Lila Leeds was nearly twenty-one years old now and she knew she was never going to be the new Lana Turner. For a while after the arrest it had seemed almost fun to get the attention, to see her face in the paper, to have people on the street asking for an autograph, even if there was a shifty look or a raised eyebrow attached to the request. As the months passed, however, it became harder to see any good in it. She wished she was like Bob, with powerful people to look after her, to give the good word to the columnists, keep her name from being buried in the dirt. Lila knew she was washed up in Hollywood. After the guilty verdict she was depressed, scared of going to jail. “I cracked,” Lila said. One night a few days before her sentencing, she met up with a friend from the clubs who promised to give her a new kick, help her forget her troubles. The friend took her to a place in Santa Monica. Five of them came to the party, plus the host, a skinny little man they called “the chef.” They all sat in a circle on the floor while the skinny man laid out what looked like a random collection of trash, a cough medicine bottle, a glass straw, steel wire, a can of petroleum jelly, a hollowed-out orange, other odds and ends. Deftly he assembled a homemade smoker, lit it up, nursed the small blue flame. From an aspirin tin he scraped a black gummy substance onto the tip of the wire, rotated the wire between his fingers, and held the pea-sized black gum over the flame. The stuff looked like a tiny, crackling black marshmallow. The chef told her exactly what to do when he finished cooking the ball and slid it into the bottle.

“Now,” the chef said.

Lila lay on her side so she could breathe deeper, emptied her lungs, then sucked on the glass straw with one long drag.

The Big Steal
began shooting on the RKO lot with a cast that included—in addition to Jane Greer—William Bendix, Patric Knowles, John Qualen, and former silent star Ramon Navarro. Most of the interior sequences were completed, and a location trip to Mexico was optimistically scheduled for the weekend following Mitchum’s sentencing.

On Wednesday, February 9, the crowd outside the courthouse began gathering at dawn. First the contingents of teenagers and other devoted fans, young girls mostly; then the representatives of the press, from crime reporters to gossip columnists and newsreel cameramen; finally the idle curious, passersby, and local workers randomly stopping to see the movie star come to receive justice. Mitchum arrived, dazzling in a light gray suit, white shirt, and silver tie, the crowd oohing and ahhing like it was a premiere at the Chinese Theatre. Dorothy did not accompany her husband. Lila Leeds came elegantly attired in her tailored, cream-colored suit and black heels, a small black purse in her left hand. Her mouth was painted a glistening candy-apple red. Her eyes were red, too, and she appeared unsteady. A spokesman told the press she had been ill and in bed for the last eight days.

Inside the packed eighth-floor courtroom of Judge Clement Nye, counsels Jerry Giesler and Grant Cooper completed the final legal fine-tuning before the punishments could be pronounced. Due to a more recent legal dispute, the sentencing of Robin Ford had been postponed, and the would-be realtor currently languished in a jail cell without bail (the new charges against him would ultimately be dismissed). Judge Nye asked if all concerned parties had read the reports prepared by the probation department. Mitchum’s concluded that the individual was “psychologically ill-equipped for his sudden rise to fame.”

The judge addressed the actor: “I realize that you are idolized by hundreds of thousands of people. However, you have overlooked the responsibilities that go with such prominence. You have failed to set an example of good citizenship.

“I am sorry for both of these defendants but respect for law and order must be taken into consideration. This case has attracted attention not only locally but throughout the world and I am treating it the same as I would any other case of a similar nature.”

Judge Nye sentenced Mitchum and Leeds to a year in the county jail. He then suspended the sentence and placed the pair on probation for a period of
two years, sixty days of that to be experienced in the confines of the county jail. The second count of possession was taken off the court calendar, which was understood to mean that it would be dismissed. A recess was called, and as the judge moved out of sight, the crowd moved in. Photographers trampled each other, desperate to shoot the convicts in the throes of anguish, fear, whatever. Fans and spectators jammed into the courtroom, shouted Mitchum’s name, and cried out words of encouragement. A squadron of RKO reps bumped heads in a huddled meeting. Mitchum stood, showing no emotion, bending his head to Jerry Giesler’s whispered wisdom, while Lila Leeds, standing a few feet to his right, mouth hanging slackly, quavered at the onslaught of exploding photo flashes. Asked if he had come prepared to go to jail Mitchum said that he had forgotten to bring a toothbrush. “I travel light, but this is too light.” Then Deputy Sheriffs Walter Horta and Marjorie Kellogg took Mitchum and Leeds into custody, handcuffed them, and led them away from the frenzied audience. The quartet boarded an elevator bound for the jail cells on the top floors of the building. Women’s quarters were on the thirteenth floor. Lila Leeds said, “Lucky thirteen.”

Mitchum exchanged his suit for jail-issue denim blues, though he was allowed under jail rules to keep his own footgear, an expensive pair of brown Cordovans. And he exchanged his old identity for a new one: prisoner #91234. From the concessionaire he bought four quarts of milk and two cartons of cigarettes. No supplies from outside sources were permitted. The chief jailer explained some more rules. Other than his attorneys, he was allowed two visitors per week. All correspondence going in or out had to be scrutinized and censored. Breakfast was at 6:30, soup at 10:00
A.M.
, dinner at 3:00, lights out at 9:00. The prisoner was given a cup and spoon, which he was required to keep clean.

He was taken to his cell, a tiny cubicle with steel bunks, pairs of two-inch mattresses and wool blankets, a sink, a toilet. It slept two, but for now the actor had the place to himself. The cell door clanged shut. He sat on the bunk, lit a cigarette, and stared down at his cordovans. Sixty days. He thought about Jerry Giesler and his massive fees. They would have to sell the house to pay him off. For what? Any court-appointed pro bono correspondence school ambulance chaser could have gotten sixty days.

At dawn they woke him, gave him a mop and a bucket, and told him to clean up. He was finishing up when they let in some reporters and photographers. It was arranged by—somebody.

A reporter asked him how he’d slept. Fine, fine. He was beginning to like it there. No pictures through the bars, boys, that’s all I ask. I don’t want my kids to see that and get scared. He mopped some more. What did he talk about with the other prisoners? “Oh,” Mitchum said, “we just discuss our lives of crime.”

In the mess hall, slurping his soup, he had a conversation with the tank trusty. “Be careful,” the man said. The word was that somebody wanted to set him up, rack him up in the joint. “They wanted to make me for the whole deuce,” Mitchum would remember. “They didn’t want to be wrong. I didn’t know which side of the fuzz it was. . . . Man, they can do anything they want, you know—charge you with some minor infraction of the rules and you end up doin’ two big ones in Quentin. No fuckin’ way. I couldn’t hack that.”

RKO and Jerry Giesler arranged for their boy to be transferred out of the county jail to the sheriff’s Wayside Honor Farm in a rural area forty miles north of Los Angeles. On February 16 he joined seven other prisoners boarding the sheriff’s shiny new bus for the ride to Castaic. Someone had alerted the press, and a motorcade of reporters followed the vehicle as it pulled away from the Halls of Justice. Mitchum sat in the last row against a barred window with his hat pulled down over his eyes. On arrival his jail cell denims were taken away and replaced with honor farm overalls. The preening supervisors put him through a humiliating performance for the sake of the newspeople who had come all this way to see the actor’s new digs. Everyone tramped over to the dairy barn, where a guard commanded Mitchum to milk a white cow named Daisy Mae. Squatting on a stool he fiddled with the udders, squirting streams of milk all over the place while the cameras snapped and snapped. Then it was on to the cement plant and more forced poses for the photographers. After all this bullshit, the supervisor told him he had missed out on lunch.

Days at the honor farm were long and wearying. You arose at 5:30, ate breakfast, began making cement blocks by 7:00, worked until 4:30 with a half-hour off for lunch. You had the evenings mostly to yourself. You could read books from the library, listen to the radio, play cards. It was a mindless grind. All Mitchum could say in its favor was that he hadn’t slept so well in ages.

He wasn’t, as it turned out, the only celebrity at Castaic. Big Bill Tilden, at that time the greatest and most famous tennis player in the world, was doing a year for contributing to the delinquency of a minor—he had stuck his hand in the fly of a sixteen-year-old male hitchhiker. (Jerry Giesler had refused to accept Tilden as a client.) Mitchum seldom saw the famed sports figure. Among
the prisoners, child molesters were targets for physical abuse, and so Tilden was isolated and given work that kept him out of harm’s way.

Visitors came up on the weekends. One of Hughes’s secret policemen drove Dorothy to Castaic on two occasions. Reva Frederick visited once. “Howard Hughes said I had to take Robert candy—Hershey bars—to keep up his energy. He was very worried about that. So I brought those up. You went in. There was a table where you met the prisoner, and a bench on either side. Robert seemed fine. Relaxed. Listened to the news I had and then said goodbye. And we made the long drive back.” Mitchum’s friend Joe Losey appeared one weekend, toting a container of chili from Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood. Don Siegel, about to leave for Mexico to shoot some more of
The Big Steal
with the unincarcerated actors (using a double for Mitchum wherever possible), also came up, ostensibly to drop off the newly revised script. The manila envelope bulged suspiciously from the candy and things people at the studio had slipped into it along with the mimeoed pages, but the guards didn’t give it a second glance; Siegel realized he could as easily have brought in a couple of guns or some heroin for all anyone seemed to care. Nevertheless, Mitchum emptied the package and quickly hid the contraband under his shirt.

“You are my favorite director,” he said.

“Oh, it’s really nothing,” said Siegel. “Calm nerves, courage, and hatred for authority.”

“We share many, many things.”

Most visitors reported Bob as healthy and happy enough, considering the circumstances. He was at peace with the world, he said. If that was the case, then Associated Press correspondent James Bacon caught him on a very bad day. “I went to see him at the honor farm after he’d been there a little while,” Bacon remembered. “Just to see him as a friend, really, not as a reporter. He was in a kind of a black mood, I guess. He said he had ruined everything, had screwed up all the breaks he had gotten, and why had he done this to his family, all this kind of thing. And he was crying. I mean real tears. I had never seen him like that, never did again. I told him the scandal had made him more famous, and I thought he was going to be bigger than he had ever been. I believed it, but what else was I going to say to the guy?”

Worrying about Mitchum’s state of mind, Howard Hughes decided to go up to Castaic himself and give the boy a pep talk. Hughes had a liaison arranged with the sheriff to allow a special weekday visit and to let him meet with Mitchum in a private room without any guards listening or looking at them. He and Perry Leiber rode up to Castaic in Howard’s old sedan. Hughes was wearing a particularly old and sloppy outfit, faded khakis, a stained shirt,
his cracked old aviator jacket, and torn sneakers. They stopped at a roadside store along the way, Howard announcing he had a craving for ice cream. He went into the store and came out some minutes later telling Lieber he didn’t have any money on him. Lieber couldn’t understand what had taken him so long in that case. Hughes tried to explain himself. It was like a Laurel and Hardy routine. They were two hours late for their appointment at Castaic. The captain in charge, under orders from the sheriff, came out to greet the scruffy visitor and offered Hughes the use of his own office for the meeting with Mitchum. Seeing the multiethnic mix of prisoners working on the grounds, the phobic and racist Hughes requested that no prisoners be allowed anywhere near the office while he was still there.