Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (36 page)

Hughes and Mitchum sat on either side of the desk in the captain’s office.

“Bob, I just came up here to reassure you that RKO is with you one hundred per cent. And I want to ask you if there is anything that I or the studio can do for you under the circumstances?”

Mitchum said, “I need fifty thousand dollars to pay off my legal fees and to buy a decent house for my family.”

“I’ll see to it.” It would be a loan, at 5 percent interest.

Then Hughes handed over the gift he had brought for the actor, a brown paper sack filled with vitamins.

Meanwhile: After jumping bail and becoming the subject of a fugitive warrant, Vicki Evans returned to Los Angeles. On March 10 she went on trial. In a curious turn of events, the testimony of prosecution witness Det. Sgt. A. A. Barr seemed to paint Miss Evans in a sympathetic light. Barr testified that Vicki had not been smoking anything when they broke into the Ridpath house and then quoted her as valiantly trying to save her guilty pals.
“Can’t I take the blame for this?”
Barr said she asked him.
(“Bob and Lila have so much to lose.”

The jury found Evans not guilty.

On March 24, a week before his scheduled release (ten days shaved from his sentence for good behavior), Mitchum was expelled from the honor farm and sent back to the county jail. Chief Jailer Charles Fitzgerald assured reporters it was no reflection on Mitchum’s behavior at the farm, but a steady stream of visiting agents, writers, and reporters from Hollywood had begun to interfere with the work schedule at the brickyard. Climbing off the bus in Los Angeles, Bob was bronzed from the sun, had grown a thick moustache, had lost ten pounds. Reporters caught him en route to his cell.

“I feel wonderful,” he declared. “I worked hard, slept well and batted .800 on the softball team. We won seven out of eight games.” Castaic, he said, was “like Palm Springs, without the riff-raff.”

The final week went by without incident. After breakfast on Wednesday, March 30, Mitchum was released from custody. Reporters were waiting. “I’ve been happy in jail,” he told them, tailoring his opinions for public consumption. “Nobody envied me. Nobody wanted anything from me. Nobody wanted my bars or the bowl of pudding they shoved at me through the slot. I did my work and they let me alone.” He had developed a new taste for privacy. “I’m through with my so-called pals. I’ll see only my wife, my two children, and a couple of close friends. Parties? I’d stand out like a monster at a party. I’m typed—a character—and I guess I’ll have to bear that the rest of my life.” He was going back to work as soon as possible, he told the group. “I’ve got to. I’m broke. . . . And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m heading for home.”

The house on Oak Glen offered more of the same. The studio had sent a publicist to take charge. Dorothy couldn’t believe it. Her reunion with her husband was to be a staged event for publicity purposes. She held her tongue, but it wasn’t easy, watching the RKO man posing them, patting their hair like he was grooming a couple of poodles. Bob put a comforting arm around her, and she pressed her head to his chest and smiled thinly at the far wall as the strangers asked questions and scribbled in their little pads, took pictures, flooding the room with flashes of ugly white light. Yes, it was great to have Bob home again, and thank you for asking.

An article Mitchum supposedly penned himself, published in
Photoplay
magazine a few weeks after his release from jail, asked the question: “Do I G
ET
A
NOTHER
C
HANCE?
” (subtitled: “Sixty days—time enough for a man to think”).

In the last few months I’ve been surrounded by shadows. Deep, dark shadows through which little sunlight has filtered. Financially I am back where I started. But the bitter pills I have swallowed have made me a better man. I have attained a peace of mind which I did not think possible.

I think too many of us are apt to carelessly overlook little infringements of the law and the moral code. Some of us find ourselves taking one step too far . . . refusing to heed the little warning signals of our conscience until it is too late and disaster has overcome us.

Now I am facing life with a new sense of responsibility to the world, to myself, and above all to my wife and our two sons. No matter what is cooking for me in the future, I am dedicating my life to dispelling the cloud hanging over my family. . . .

A stirring plea for understanding and forgiveness from a reformed sinner, it shared the
Photoplay
page with an advertisement for a Lysol douche. “Be confident of your appealing feminine daintiness,” read the ad, “truly
cleanse
the vaginal canal.”

D
OWN IN
T
EHUACAN
, M
EXICO
, in the rift valley 150 kilometers southeast of Mexico City, director Don Siegel had been wrestling with a dilemma: how to make a movie starring a man who was not there. The screenplay had been revised and stripped down to accommodate the special circumstances, making
The Big Steal
even more of an exercise in abstraction. The whole thing had devolved into an endless car chase—no premise, no plot, just chasing. All day long on a highway in the sun-roasted valley he filmed the actors driving from right to left, left to right, occasionally directing them to look in the rearview or over one shoulder. Siegel had wanted to postpone the location shoot until Mitchum was available, but still more scheduling problems prevented that—William Bendix and Patric Knowles had commitments to other studios, the permits from the Mexican government were restricted to certain dates. Why they weren’t shooting the whole megillah on the Gower Street lot and in Griffith Park Siegel didn’t have a clue.
The Big Steal
had started out as a tough thriller, but as the project fell into disarray on location Siegel felt that no one could take it seriously, and he began to direct the actors to play everything for laughs, or at least tongue-in-cheek.

At last came word that the production’s greatest problem, the absence of the leading player, was about to end. Mitchum, just a few days out of the jug, had landed in Mexico City and was on his way. Knowing how much had to be done and how little time he had, Siegel prepared to shoot Bob’s first scene as soon as he arrived.

The hired car rolled into town just after noon. A boy from the hotel ran to get Siegel and brought him over to the entranceway where a big black sedan
was standing, a couple of hotel staffers peering into the back windows. The driver from Mexico City was sitting on the curb smoking a cigarette.

“Where’s Mitchum?” Siegel asked.

The driver blew smoke and pointed to the car. Siegel cracked the door and saw his star and another man—described facetiously as Mitchum’s bodyguard. The other guy was passed out cold, but Mitchum seemed to be conversing with him anyway.

“Drunk?” Siegel asked the driver.

“A whole bottle of tequila. Maybe two.”

With the help of perhaps three-quarters of the hotel staff, the two big men were extracted from the automobile and carried to their rooms. Bystanders watched the amazing parade, the mumbling Hollywood star crossing the lobby atop a human palanquin, another man being toted horizontally as if on a stretcher, and a third man, the gringo movie director who looked like a seedy version of Harry James, walking upright and cursing the other two.

Siegel was damned if he was going to lose the whole day to this nonsense. Up in the actor’s room he ordered a pot of coffee and made Mitchum suck it down. Patric Knowles popped in, and Siegel showed him the problem. Knowles said they had to get him down to the hotel’s steam room. It was a trick Errol Flynn had taught him.

“A half hour of steam and he’ll be good as new.”

Mitchum was already becoming a bit more cooperative, Siegel thought. He and Knowles got him up, one under each shoulder, took him downstairs to the hotel gym, and led him inside the steam room.

“Steam’s the thing, Bobby,” said the dapper Knowles.

Mitchum punched him in the head. Knowles cracked his skull against the sweaty, hot wall and then lost his footing on the damp floor. Mitchum pulled him halfway up and clobbered him some more.

Knowles screamed.

Mitchum proceeded to beat the tar out of him. The director, trying to stop him, leaped on Mitchum’s back and was instantly thrown off. He did it again. “When I tried to grab him, he would spin his shoulder, which sent me spinning around the wet walls.” It was all that goddamned exercise in prison, Siegel decided painfully. “Mitch was in the best shape of his life.” Siegel crawled over to help the groggy, moaning Pat Knowles, and the pair struggled out of there.

“He was one tough hombre,” said Siegel, “with a mean streak that we could not handle.”

•  •  •

“Bob joined us in Mexico straight out of prison,” said Jane Greer. “His hair had been chopped off. He had a great tan, he was in great shape from breaking rocks, and he looked wonderful. I didn’t know how they were going to match him with the film they had shot before he went away.”

Seeing Greer and Mitchum together as he lined the pair up for a shot, Don Siegel wondered how he was going to match either of them. Mitchum was certainly tanner and leaner. He had trimmed at least three inches from his gut. Greer, though, now well over four months pregnant, had developed a noticeable pouch. Christ, Siegel thought,
they’ve exchanged stomachs!

“I didn’t want anyone to know I was pregnant,” said Greer. “But there was no place to hide down there. I wore one outfit, and it was ridiculous for anyone being pregnant—a slim skirt, a little bolero jacket, a tight sash around the waist. And every scene in that open car. I had to stay on a diet like crazy. Cottage cheese and fruit.

“The location was a little rugged, you know, a long drive up these winding roads, nothing around but the natives with their little huts. Then all day in the car getting shot at by Bill Bendix. And I was prone to morning sickness. I had a supply of these little pills I took so I could get through the morning and the rest of the day. I was driving out in the limousine with Bendix, and I sneaked a pill into my mouth. He wanted to know what it was. I said, ‘It’s for the
turistas.
Montezuma’s Revenge.’ He said, ‘Oh really? Give me some of those.’ And he liked them and starting taking them from me every day. He thought the pills protected him, and he drank all the local water, ate the ice. I had to send to my doctor for more pills. But I didn’t want to tell anyone I was pregnant.”

The South of the Border intestinal disorder known to strike visiting Americanos had spared the
Big Steal
company until one fateful day on a rural location. Siegel was rehearsing a scene with Mitchum and Greer and was ready to roll when Mitchum suddenly took off for the bushes. Siegel decided to do a close-up of Jane Greer instead, and cameraman Harry Wild lined it up. Then Greer ran away. Siegel looked around. “Jesus Christ. Shoot Pat Knowles through his window,” he told Wild. Wild was nowhere to be seen.

“I showed no sign of diarrhea until early afternoon,” Siegel recalled. “Then Montezuma struck.” Two presumably nonunion grips held him over a small stone bridge above a stream “for what seemed like hours.”

Considering Mitchum’s recent troubles, Hughes and RKO had shown either great ignorance or a perverse sense of humor in sending the actor on to Mexico, particularly to a region known for the high quality of its cannabis crop. “In
Mexico they knew all about what had happened to him,” said Jane Greer. “He was treated like a hero. They worshipped him because of the marijuana. And they would come up, smiling, offering him some samples. Slip it into his pockets. Peasants would put some in the cuffs of his trousers—’Here, please try our crop of marijuana, Senor Mitchum!’ Oh my, he had a hard time keeping away from it because they just loved him down there.”

Siegel’s skills as a montage director at Warners served
The Big Steal
well. He was required to help Sam Beetley piece together a relatively seamless finished product out of footage that—due to the protracted shooting schedule—jumped from winter to spring landscapes within the same sequence and revealed his stars to have amazing weight gains and losses within the brief span of the film’s story. In the end, the slapdash quality of the film seemed to work in its favor. Brisk, amiable, pointless, it resembled a seventy-one-minute live action Roadrunner cartoon. The
New Republic
reviewer said it best, calling
The Big Steal
“a ludicrous miscarriage of an adventure picture”—and he
liked
it. For Siegel, in retrospect, it was the real beginning of what would be a long and frequently distinguished career as a maker of fast, tough, action movies.

Dorothy had joined her husband in Mexico for the last week of filming. While they were away, the children were left in the care of a nanny. On April 28 a precocious five-year-old Christopher Mitchum and four other kids had a run-in with a store owner on Cahuenga Boulevard, not far from the Mitchum home. When the store owner chased them away, young Chris ran into an oncoming car. He was rushed to Hollywood Receiving Hospital and treated for cuts and bruises. When Bob and Dorothy got back and heard of the incident, they were newly motivated to move out of the small house and congested neighborhood.

They both wanted a place with plenty of breathing room, a place in the countryside with space for the kids to play and—Dorothy doubtless hoped—to isolate Bob from trouble and his odious cronies. Old friend Tony Caruso knew just the place. “I talked him into moving out by me in Malibu Canyon,” said Caruso. It was an unspoiled and underpopulated area. People kept horses and rode them in the hills. You could be a forty-minute drive from the studios but feel as if you were in Oregon. “I said to him, ‘Bob, they’re bothering you everywhere you go in town. You move out there, nobody’ll find you, you’ll get some peace.’ And we found him a property on Mandeville Canyon Road, just
a half block away from me. And he bought it and we were neighbors for quite a while.” As he had promised he would, Howard Hughes OKed a loan to the Mitchums for fifty thousand, to be paid back in installments beginning six months hence.