Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (38 page)

If anyone was expecting Mitchum’s exoneration to generate the headline-making frenzy of his arrest, they were to be very disappointed. As the actor liked to put it, the headline “M
ITCHUM
S
UCKS
,” sold a lot of papers, but “M
ITCHUM
D
OESN’T
S
UCK
A
FTER
A
LL
” not a one. He himself said little of the “vindication,” and his lifelong and atypical circumspection regarding this strange development can only lead to the suspicion that he was never fully informed of the DA’s findings or else was warned to keep his mouth shut—certainly the retroactive dismissal of the case was an embarrassment for the county and its agencies of law enforcement. But Mitchum’s cryptic comments plus the accusations made prior to the reinvestigation and dismissal encourage a connect-the-dots conspiracy theory: that the events leading up to Ridpath Drive were engineered by a vengeful ex-associate, mobster Mickey Cohen, and some corrupt faction in the sheriff’s department ready to do Mickey’s bidding.

Better luck next time, fellas. Mitchum put down the phone call with the news about the overturned verdict and strolled back to the soundstage, picking up where he had left off, in the middle of groping the bountiful Jane Russell.

Having championed Mitchum through the dark days of the scandal, Howard Hughes decided he did not now want to share the man’s services with anyone and bought out David Selznick’s half of the actor’s contract for four hundred
thousand dollars. In the five years to come, Mitchum would be the studio’s busiest and uncontestably its biggest star—though under Hughes’s tenure this would prove to be a somewhat dubious distinction.

Increasingly, Hughes would run RKO less as a place of business—and it was, after all, still one of only seven major motion picture studios in the country—than as a personal, rather perverse hobby. Much of his workweek would be taken up in such nonprofit activities as ferreting out leftists, elaborately seducing starlets, settling private grudges, and studying the screen tests of still more starlets. The actual movies being produced at RKO were more and more reflections of Hughes’s psychological fixations, political obsessions, and sexual fantasies. His self-indulgent need to see certain things on film exactly as he anticipated them, his demands for retakes and retroactive recasting of films till they met with his satisfaction, would mean continual production delays and cost overruns and the destruction of RKO as a reliable source of product for exhibitors. A personal, obstinate, and perfectionist style of moviemaking—with its echoes of Griffith and von Stroheim—might have been seen as admirable or heroic, even in Hollywood, except that the things Hughes obsessed over were cleavage and fistfights and projects that everyone else looked at as pulp trash.

Mitchum never forgot that Hughes had stuck by him after his narcotics arrest when he could so easily have thrown him to the dogs and ended his career forever. Mitchum would bitch and moan about many of the subsequent decisions Hughes made for him, and he came to agree with those who thought the aviator was losing his marbles, but he would never forget Howard’s loyalty and would continue to refer to him as a friend long after they had seen each other for the last time. At RKO Bob’s nickname for Hughes was “the Phantom” for his mysterious and nocturnal comings and goings, and sometimes “the Thin Man.” Aware of the rumors that Hughes had all the dressing rooms and offices bugged, Mitchum would amuse onlookers by talking to the wall or under a desk—”Did you hear what I said, Phantom, you deaf fucker? You want me to repeat it?”

Because so many of the RKO personnel were intimidated, mystified, or repulsed by Hughes, Mitchum’s directors and costars would sometimes ask him to convey their complaints to the man. Mitchum would tell them it was no easier for him to see Hughes than it was for anybody else. His rare meetings with Howard were arranged like a scene straight out of an RKO film noir—a midnight call, an anonymous driver picking him up in a sedan with tinted windows, taking him off to some stripped-down hotel bungalow or to Hughes’s dirty office or screening room. Occasionally he was transferred into another
car, one idling on a street corner or in an alleyway outside a warehouse. Howard would be there sitting in the backseat, sometimes in a suit and tie, sometimes in dirty work clothes and smelling a little ripe, but acting as if everything was as normal as could be, greeting him warmly, asking about the family. They would sit in the backseat, Mitchum would light up a butt and maybe tell some ribald story, and Hughes would hold his head down and cock his left ear, then laugh with that high-pitched squeak that sounded like you’d stepped on a cat’s tail. Not that he always got the jokes. Hughes struck Mitchum as completely humorless and very much a Texas square. Hughes, for his part, thought Mitchum the most cynical and carefree man he knew. “Bob,” he told him, “you’re like a pay toilet—you don’t give a shit for nothing.” That was a Hughes joke. One night Mitchum got into a car with him and they drove off down the coast to a waterside hangar where Howard brought the actor on board the legendary/notorious birchwood troop carrier he had built, the HK-1
Hercules,
better known as “the Spruce Goose.” “You’ll enjoy this, Bob, having worked at Lockheed.” Does this cat think I designed airplanes there? Mitchum wondered. He went through the spectacular craft with awe, sat down in the cockpit next to the Phantom, and didn’t know what to say. Howard was a strange, amazing man.

In the last months of 1949, Mitchum made
Carriage Entrance,
eventually released as
My Forbidden Past,
a vehicle for Ava Gardner, one of Hughes’s off and on lovers. Set in 1890s New Orleans, it was the sordid story of a sexually obsessed heiress with an “unholy ancestry” and a young doctor wrongly accused of murdering his wife. With the exception of Melvyn Douglas’s fine work as Ava’s cruel cousin, it was a film entirely without merit. Cold and wooden throughout, Mitchum seemed to deliberately withhold anything resembling a performance. Hughes fiddled with the editing for over a year, holding up release of the film until spring 1951.

Gardner impressed Mitchum with her tough-talking, heavy-drinking, hard-living style. Described by one biographer as “sluttish” and by columnist and pal James Bacon as a “nymphomaniac,” she was, to be more polite, a sexual adventuress with a string of high-profile lovers currently in tow—including Hughes and Frank Sinatra—but Ava always had room for one more, and shortly after filming began the actress set her sights on her latest costar. In their first kissing scene she pulled the same gag he had pulled on Janet Leigh, only she wasn’t kidding. He began taking her home at night. They began an intensely sexual affair. She was the most beautiful, exciting woman he had ever
known. As an afterthought, Mitchum put a call through to Hughes, who had dated Gardner off and on through the years, concerned—a little late—that Hughes might find out Mitchum was screwing her and take offense. He made a joke of it, asking the Phantom whether
he
thought Mitchum should sleep with the dame. “You might as well,” said Hughes. “Everyone’ll think you’re a fag if you don’t.”

Mitchum would tell friends that Ava got serious fast. She told him they should go away together; he should leave his family and keep house with her. He told her she’d have to ask Dorothy about that. And she claimed that she did. Ava said she phoned the house, said, “You’ve had him for ten years. Give somebody else a chance.”

“What does Bob say?”

“He said to ask you.”

“Okay, so you asked me. The answer is no.”

Ava would get sentimental in old age, reflecting, “I think every girl who ever worked with Bob Mitchum fell in love with him.” Mitchum, unsenti-mentally, would speak of Ava’s fondness for performing an intimate act known as a “golden shower.”

After a brief respite for the Christmas season, Mitchum was back before the cameras in January 1950, shooting
Where Danger Lives
with another Hughes-tested actress, Faith Domergue. Craftily weaned away from her parents by the millionaire, the big-eyed, sultry brunette youngster had lived with Hughes from the time she was fifteen, ostensibly being readied for silver screen stardom. After long years of nurturing, Domergue took the lead in Howard’s expensive, avenging-Corsican disaster,
Vendetta,
still unreleased five years after the production had wrapped. By default, Domergue would make her official cinematic debut in a comparatively modest and altogether superior film, one of the darkest and most unrelenting examples of the film noir genre. Scripted by Howard Hughes pal and suspense whiz Charles Bennett (
The 39 Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much), Where Danger Lives
is the story of the gorgeous and psychotic wife of a rich older man who implicates her young doctor/lover in the murder of her husband. The doctor struggles with the growing agony of a head injury as the pair flee to the Mexican border and to the violent culmination of their fatal attraction. The tale contained favorite motifs of the conflicted misogynist/girl crazy Hughes—the danger and duplicity of beautiful females, the painful cost of lust and sexual obsession. For Mitchum the role of Dr. Jeff Cameron was a kind of surreal amplification of
Out of the Past’s
Jeff
Bailey, another corruptible man passively accepting his own destruction, here the idea of losing one’s mind to an alluring woman made literal by the character’s nearly fatal brain concussion. The quality of a nightmare was expertly achieved by director John Farrow’s harsh staging and the bleak, shrouded images caught by noir’s king cameraman Nicholas Musuraca—another Mitchum picture, as the actor said, “lit by matches.”

Johnny Farrow was the only director Bob had ever met who could outdrink him. The good-looking, blond, former Australian seaman (he’d entered the United States by jumping ship from a windjammer) and father of future Mitchum costar Mia, Farrow was known as a mean, ruthless son of a bitch by everyone who knew him, except for the coteries of Roman Catholic priests with whom he spent much time in pious and arcane discussions of Church doctrine and ecumenical history. Mitchum, like everyone else, had a difficult time equating the roistering philanderer he knew with the man who wrote devotional biographies of the saints and of Father Damien, “the leper priest.”

“D’ya ever
dare
go to confession?” Mitchum asked him.

Farrow said he went every week to one of the oldest Spanish churches in California, downtown near Alvarado Street, told the priest everything, and received absolution. “The poor bastard doesn’t speak a word of English.”

“He was a professional Catholic, Farrow,” said Reva Frederick. “Always surrounded by nuns and priests. But his private life was entirely different. He cast the extras—the women—almost entirely with women he wanted for his own amusement, girls he would make at his command.” Mitchum enjoyed Farrow’s company in a bar, but at work he could be unbearable, pinching every female’s ass (he caddishly gave his wife, Maureen O’Sullivan, an unbilled cameo as an “understanding” girlfriend) and revealing a sadistic streak when it came to putting the actor through his paces. In a scene in a sleazy bordertown hotel, the injured, barely conscious Mitchum character (having just been beaten up by Domergue) is required to crawl out of his room and then slide and tumble down three flights of stairs. Farrow demanded they shoot it without a stuntman, with the camera on a descending crane following Mitchum’s fall. The hastily constructed staircase set was open at the sides, and when Mitchum started tumbling he nearly slipped over, just avoiding a thirty-foot drop to the wooden plank floor. Sid Rogell happened to come onto the set as the take began and ran screaming at Farrow’s throat.

“You goddamn idiot! Are you trying to kill him?” said Rogell.

Carpenters put in a railing, and Farrow restaged the shot to minimize the risk to the performer. Rogell wanted them to use a stuntman. Mitchum refused—he wasn’t going to have Farrow calling him a fairy for the rest of the
shoot. Down he tumbled. But when the director blithely called, “All right, let’s try it again,” Mitchum told him to go fuck himself.

Howard Hughes was so pleased with the nasty, brutal results of this creative collaboration, he put Mitchum and Farrow together again for an immediate follow-up, a project that began life as
Smiler with a Gun
but would come to be known to the ages as
His Kind of Woman.
For this one, instead of the problematic Faith Domergue, he would use another, more abundantly talented actress he had also nurtured since her teens: Jane Russell. In 1940, she had been nineteen years old, a chiropodist’s assistant and aspiring model, with a prodigious 38-22-36 figure, a dedicated churchgoer living with her family when Hughes discovered her and cast her in
The Outlaw.
Publicity photos of Jane, massive bosom upheaving, had made her a household name years before her furiously hyped and controversial debut ever hit the theaters. She was the actress most closely identified with Hughes in the public’s mind, though she was one of the few female performers of his acquaintance with whom he was never romantically linked (she preferred less scrawny and diffident men, and in 1943, she married Bob Waterfield, a well-known football player). Russell’s acting in
The Outlaw
had been fairly terrible, but she had improved greatly since then; and in 1950, her down-to-earth charm, luscious physique, and biglimbed grace made her one of the real pleasures of the current cinema.

Mitchum and Russell: It was an inevitable pairing for RKO. The studio’s biggest assets, the screen’s two greatest chests, together for the first time. Hughes’s excitement overflowed at the prospect, and he was imagining the sort of lurid publicity campaign and colossal erotic images he would commission even before the first frame of film was exposed.

Farrow began with the idea of making another grim film noir, but the script by Frank Fenton, the man who had supplied so much of the great, glistening dialogue for
Out of the Past,
turned out to be very different from the overwrought
Where Danger Lives
or even the darkly romantic
Out of the Past;
nor did it have much in common with an antic adventure picture like
The Big Steal.
It was quirky, going this way and that, light in parts, shot through with a cool, ironic wit and mischievousness while still being bluntly violent, lascivious, dark, with lots of room for the beatings and breast shots that Hughes and Farrow demanded. Fenton knew Mitchum well, and the script became reflective not only of the writer’s sardonic point of view (the script’s major subplot, for example, was a satire of certain absurd Hollywood types) but of the lead actor’s own style and outlook—detached, amused, off-kilter. Fenton even wrote
in bits and pieces of Mitchum’s personal history and a few private jokes. It was a strange sort of a script, with the plot mostly at the very beginning and end and a long middle section where nothing much happened. To Farrow’s credit, he never tried to resolve the script’s tonal inconsistencies but ran with them all the way.