Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (43 page)

As the company moved from rodeo to rodeo, and despite the number of bones they saw breaking before their eyes as cowboys tumbled through the air and crumbled in the dirt, Mitchum and Kennedy fell under the spell of the testosterone-charged atmosphere, and each took a turn—violating the terms of their studio insurance coverage—riding a wild horse and a Brahma bull. Mitchum would recall his bumpy ride: “I get on . . . and they all say, ‘It’s OK, he’s just a retired old bronc,’ and this thing is turned loose . . . and I can’t get off him. They’d go in and try and pick me off and my horse would turn around and kick the pickup horse. . . . I’m bleeding from my hair by this time. . . .”

Even Ray felt compelled to show he had what it took, hopping aboard a bucking
bronco at the San Francisco Cow Palace. “I guess,” he said, “we all have a little of that wildness in us.”

They returned to Hollywood, filming a few more bits and pieces, and then Ray began putting the whole thing together. At Jerry Wald’s insistence, an alternative version of the ending had been shot, with Mitchum surviving and going off into the sunset with an ex-girlfriend. David Dortort believed that Jerry Wald never understood what the picture was about and cared only that audiences liked happy endings. In the end Ray prevailed, and Jeff McCloud expired as planned. Mitchum claimed he had Reva sneak into the editing room and throw Wald’s version in the incinerator.

The actor was sufficiently intrigued about how it had all turned out that he did something he hadn’t done in a long time. “Have you got any film cut together that I can see?” he asked the director.

“Sure,” Ray said, “I’ve got about seven reels for you.”

He set up the screening for that evening. Mitchum sat by himself in the dark watching the two-thirds of the picture, and afterward, said Ray, “came out of the projection room walking about ten feet high.” A celebration was in order, and they went across the street to Lucey’s. Ray crawled for home some hours later, recalling that when he had last seen his star, Mitchum and some new pals—a pair of drunken FBI agents—were lurching about in the restaurant’s kitchen, Mitchum firing an FBI handgun at Lucey’s dirty dishes while the kitchen staff ran for cover.

A key work in the postwar era’s advancing demythification of the Hollywood West,
The Lusty Men
(a Hughes-approved title;
The Losers
would have been more appropriate) depicted the pain and despair underlying the rodeo’s festive surface. Anything but conventional, romantic, heroic figures, the film’s cowboys are crippled, scarred, middle-aged, and mostly dim-witted men living a sleazy, nomadic existence in a world of cold-water trailers and domestic strife, men sustained by a few dangerous moments of “buzz” when they’re in the saddle, and the dream of prize money that will be squandered come morning. Evidencing the formula-driven thinking of assembly-line scenarists, the story itself and many of the dramatic ingredients were hardly groundbreaking—a rehash of
Test Pilot, The Crowd Roars, Manpower,
and all those two-men-and-a-woman-plus-a-dangerous-profession pictures—but Horace McCoy’s incisive and poetic writing of individual scenes (the author of
They Shoot Horses
clearly had a feel for life’s failures) and Nicholas Ray’s nuanced, artful direction gave
The Lusty Men
moments of lyricism and psychological resonance that set it
apart from those earlier tales of risk-taking roustabouts. Though he would be best known for his films’ neurotic energy bordering on hysteria, Ray here obtained some of his most powerful effects from emotional restraint and simple staging, most memorably in Mitchum’s last scene. The offhand style and quiet underplaying only increased the scene’s emotional force: the broken cowboy sighing his last ironic aphorism (”Guys like me last forever”); and even more devastating (Ray repeating a bit from
They Live by Night
but to much greater effect here), the almost imperceptible cutaway to the young tomboy, Rusty, standing in the background and silently mouthing “I love you . . .” to the dying ex-champion.

Typical of Ray’s work, the performances were all strong and three-dimensional, from the leads to the smallest bit parts, including, most memorably among the supporting players, a sad/funny turn by Arthur Hunnicutt and vivacious work by Eleanor Todd as a hilariously sexy lover of the rodeo, branding men with her teeth and guzzling from a phallically extended bottle of champagne. Only Arthur Kennedy, an excellent actor but looking more like a crafty traveling salesman than a potential rodeo champ, was manifestly miscast. Susan Hayward, too, was something less than authentic-seeming as a former Southwest tamale-joint barmaid, though her powerful and discerning performance more than compensated for her lack of a rustic personality. As to Mitchum (beefier than he had ever appeared on screen), he was both believable and superb, carefully tempering his charisma and sex appeal with a distant sadness that perfectly illuminated the character of Jeff McCloud as a man caught between past glory and a future of lonely failure, a man who has come to accept that life is a matter of “chicken today, feathers tomorrow.” He was as authentic-seeming a Westerner as Gary Cooper but unromanticized in a way Coop would never have allowed—Jeff blithely living off a friend’s hard-won winnings, coveting the same friend’s wife, then throwing his life away in a moment of wounded pride. Another portrait in his gallery of existential loners, outsiders, and drifters, McCloud was Mitchum’s subtlest and most enigmatic characterization to date.

Mitchum and Ray: a marvelous pairing that should have continued. The director tried to land Mitchum for the Sterling Hayden role in
Johnny Guitar
over at Republic but got nowhere. They never worked together again.

The Lusty Men
received mostly excellent reviews, Mitchum heaped with praise, something he had not seen much of in the last few years. But as Jerry Wald feared, audiences didn’t know what to make of a drab modern Western with a tragic ending. Nicholas Ray was to say of the film’s characters, “They had all lived up to what they were supposed to live up to.” And so, in their way, did the public, staying far from anywhere the film played.

•  •  •

On March 3, 1952, Dorothy Mitchum gave birth to a third child. The seven-pound, ten-ounce baby girl was named Petrine after Bob’s much loved and recently deceased grandmother (it was a long way from frigid Norway to sunny SoCal; Petrine would eventually be trimmed to a perkier-sounding Trina). RKO dispatched photographers to record the baby’s arrival at Mandeville, flashing their bulbs as Daddy dandled the infant on his knee. It was good to let the press know Bob did something other than get into bar fights when he wasn’t working.

The rest of the Mitchum brood, James and Christopher, were now ten and eight years old respectively. They were healthy, good-looking kids. Jim’s appearance was a perfect amalgam of his mother and father, though as he grew older and took on his father’s physique, people would speak of the two as dead ringers. Many thought Christopher looked like his mother, a resemblance that was accentuated by the feminine softness of his features and a gentle disposition. In adolescence the boys seemed to divide between them Robert’s twofold nature. Jim was the tough kid, an outdoorsman, liked to have fun, was drawn to acting, and acting up. Christopher was the quiet one: thoughtful and bookish, a good student, he dreamed—as his father had done—of becoming a writer.

As a parent Mitchum would be both doting and distant. When the boys were young, especially, through the first decade of his success and with his own childhood deprivations still fresh in his memory, he was generous and attentive, eager to see them enjoy the luxuries and pleasures money could buy and experience the joys of a loving father that he had never known. When they were old enough, Mitchum took them on long hunting and fishing trips, camping and roaming in the wilds of California and throughout the West, wonderful memories for all of them. At home, the boys might not see their father for days at a time—weeks or months even when he was on location or in prison—but Robert did all he could to keep weekends for home and family, and Sundays were inviolate. Photos and home movies show glimpses of the endless California summers spent by the big swimming pool, or playing ball, or riding in go-carts, faces full of grins and high spirits. In time, as the boys grew older and used to their privileges, their father’s earlier impulses would fade. The past was done and Robert had new lives to lead. In the years ahead, the changing exigencies of moviemaking took Mitchum farther and farther away and for longer periods of time—ten, eleven months a year at his busiest. Dorothy would diligently try to maintain the family unit however she could, packing them all up and shipping out to follow the wandering movie star—to
Greece, Australia, England, the Caribbean. But these visits, and Mitchum’s own sojourns back at the homestead, were only interludes of domesticity for someone who would pull off the rare trick of maintaining the vestments of both family man and wayward bachelor for most of the rest of his life.

Jean Simmons had come to America to marry Stewart Granger. The young Englishwoman, acclaimed star of
Great Expectations, Black Narcissus,
and Olivier’s
Hamlet,
was not long in the throes of wedded bliss when out of the blue came news that her contract with the J. Arthur Rank Organization in London had been purchased outright by that rapacious admirer of full-breasted brunettes, Howard Hughes. Despite the presence of the strapping “Jimmy” Granger, Hughes quickly and shamelessly imposed himself on newlywed Simmons’s private life. “I realized,” said her then-husband, “that Howard Hughes, instead of wanting this lovely actress to make films for RKO, just wanted to screw her.” At first intrigued by Hughes’s mysterious methods and contemptuously amused by his lasciviousness, Simmons soon came to despise and fear the eccentric Texan. In addition to his unwanted personal advances, he seemed intent on destroying her prospects as a film star. The situation became so ugly and inescapable that, according to Granger, the couple actually considered luring Hughes to their cliffside home and murdering him. In the end they took a more conventional means of redress and sued the man. The two sides came to a bitter standoff—Simmons agreed to appear in three more RKO productions, but all three would have to be completed before a specified, imminent date.

A furious Hughes put his minions to work preparing quickie vehicles for the woman who had spurned him. Two of these, filmed back-to-back in May and June 1952, would costar Robert Mitchum. The first was released in 1954 under the Hughes-chosen title of
She Couldn’t Say No
(like so many of Howard’s titles, it sounded like it came in a plain brown wrapper). The story was of a wealthy woman (Simmons) returning to the small Arkansas town where the residents had generously taken care of her when she was a sickly infant, and the havoc that ensues when she tries to pay them back. Mitchum was cast as the woman’s bemused love interest, a lazy physician. Handed the script and a starting date, Mitchum promptly disappeared. He found the offered role embarrassingly bad and refused to have anything to do with it. It was only days before shooting was to begin that RKO tracked him down in Dallas, Texas, and wheedled his reluctant return.
She Couldn’t Say No
was intended to be a kind of Capraesque comedy of philanthropy a la
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
and
Lady for a Day,
a goal it missed by some distance due to a weak, mirthless
screenplay and the fact that it was directed not by Frank Capra in his prime but by Lloyd Bacon in his dotage.

The second of the Simmons-Mitchum projects was of considerably greater interest.
Angel Face
(given the generic title of
Murder Story
during its fleeting production history) was a black-and-white film noir, one of the last of its kind, as it would turn out, and the very last of Howard Hughes’s touching tributes to homicidal females.

With only a brief window of eighteen days in which to squeeze out another feature with his despised star, Hughes knew he would need a fast and efficient director for the job, a disciplinarian who would crack the whip at the first sign of recalcitrance. Hughes decided the man for the job was Otto Preminger, a Viennese Jew and a sophisticated and liberal man in private life but reputed to be a pure Junker sadist on the set. An occasional film actor, he had portrayed Nazis on the screen more than once and quite convincingly. Darryl Zanuck, Preminger’s boss, agreed to loan the director to Hughes, and a screenplay was sent over at once. By Chester Erskine, it was based on the actual murder trial of a couple accused of killing the woman’s parents. Preminger read it and thought it a piece of
scheisse.
So Hughes drove over to Otto’s house at three in the morning and took him for a ride. They drove around the deserted streets of Los Angeles in the battered Chevy as Hughes told of his travails with Jean Simmons and begged him to take the job.

“You hire any writer you want to, any number of writers to rewrite the script, as long as they are not Commies,” said Hughes. “Nobody will interfere with you and that includes me. Come to my studio tomorrow and you will be like
Hitler.
” In his whining, outraged voice, Hughes said, “I’m going to get even with that little bitch.”

Accepting the assignment, Preminger turned to his agent brother Ingo for a writer, and Ingo told him he would send over “a genius” named Oscar Millard, screenwriter of
Come to the Stable
and
No Highway in the Sky.
Millard went to work. “Relations with Otto steadily deteriorated,” he recalled. Then Preminger—feeling there was no such thing as too much genius—hired another scribe, Frank Nugent, to finish the thing off. A sordid noir drama with an Electra complex subtext,
Angel Face
was about the beautiful, emotionally disturbed Diane Tremayne, unhealthily devoted to her father, a complacent, faded English novelist under the thumb of his wealthy, shrewish American wife. Summoned to save Diane’s stepmother after a suspicious accident, ambulance driver Frank Jessup falls under the sexual spell of the scheming young woman.
He accepts a chauffeur’s position at the Tremayne manor, continuing his affair with Diane in secret. Jessup comes to realize that Diane is planning to murder her stepmother, though he is morally incapable of doing anything to prevent it. She rigs a car to plunge over a cliff with Mrs. Tremayne behind the wheel, but Diane’s father unexpectedly goes along for the fatal ride. The bereft daughter and Frank are both arrested for murder. A clever attorney has them married to attract sympathy and then convinces a jury of their innocence. Diane seeks salvation in her love for Frank, but the chauffeur rejects her, tells her he’s going away forever. Offering to drive him to the bus station, Diane recreates her parents’ fatal trajectory and sends the car backward over the cliff, killing them both.