Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (5 page)

Robert wrote a letter to his mother in Bridgeport: “Petry is a coward, preying on a child. Some day I am coming back and so help me I am going to ruin him as he ruined me if he is still alive. But I suppose it will be just his luck to be dead.”
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•  •  •

They had always lived close to the bone on the Woodside farm. Uncle Bill tried to make a commercial success of the place, but his attempts to market crops—grapes, peaches, Christmas trees—had never added up to anything. They could barely be described as self-sufficient. And now, with no more support from Big Daddy Gunderson, it had become a hand-to-mouth existence. The boys wondered why their mother’s new husband back in Bridgeport didn’t make a better effort to support them. Later, more forgiving, Robert would say, “We couldn’t understand that he was full of shrapnel and couldn’t work hard enough to keep us all together as a family unit.” Instead they turned to the only member of the extended Mitchum clan who showed any propensity for solvency. Annette had begun to enjoy a degree of success as a performer. She toured on one of the East Coast vaudeville circuits for a time, part of an all-female troupe known as the Six Yankee Doodles. She was still just a girl, not long in her teens, but she had matured with all her experiences working on the road. In Washington she met a boy in the U.S. Navy named Ernie Longaker—a sailor like Big Daddy, a man in uniform like Daddy Jimmy—and she married him. Annette continued to work while Ernie went to sea. She appeared on the stage in Philadelphia and then in the chorus of a variety show in New York City. She had an apartment there, and soon she was sharing it with her peripatetic mother, two brothers, and baby Carol.

Annette believed the family had a strain of Gypsy blood on her mother’s side. None of them ever worried much about putting down roots or where next month’s rent was coming from. “They were an unusual family,” said Reva Frederick, who knew them all later in California. “They were not a warm family; I did not see a lot of emotion or physical closeness that you might see in other families. Robert was certainly not
family oriented in
the way some people are. But the women had this interesting matriarchal point of view; I don’t think they expected much from the men in the family, never expected them to be the bread-winner. Ann thought the best bet was that everybody should live together in the same place, everybody welcome. And whoever was working, I guess, chipped in and the rest took a piece of it. If you didn’t want to work that didn’t seem to bother Ann, and if you did then you could spread it around to those that didn’t. As I say, it was an interesting point of view.”

They lived now in a cold-water flat in Hell’s Kitchen, a tough slum on the West Side, midtown, crowded with poor Irish, Italians, and other immigrant groups but only blocks away from the thriving, star-laden center of American show business—Broadway. There were five, sometimes six—when Annette’s
Ernie was around—in the small place on Fifty-sixth Street. And then one more—the Major had lost his increasingly tentative position at the
Bridgeport Post.
He gathered up his few belongings—his medals, his snapshots from Mesopotamia, his yellowed letter from Winston Churchill—and took the train to New York, squeezing into the apartment with his wife, daughter and step-children.
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It was a tough, violent neighborhood and the local teens, many of them belonging to ethnic gangs, made the farm boys in Delaware look like daisies. There were threats on every block, fights to be fought or to be only very carefully avoided—if you were ever pegged as a chicken, you were a dead man. Robert showed what he was made of early on when he stepped in to save his brother from a beating, and then the entire gang descended. They “butchered” him, said his sister, but the gang members left so much of their own blood, so many of their own teeth on the Manhattan asphalt that few ever looked for a second opportunity to teach the Mitchum boys a lesson. Early on, Robert dropped the Felton twang he had picked up that characterized him as a bumpkin in New York. One of his talents was mimickry, imitating the voices and accents of the people he met. Within a month or so he was talking like a Ninth Avenue mick.

Robert had to go back to school, state law. He enrolled in Haaren High on Fifty-ninth Street. Haaren was no Felton High School. There were all kinds of ornery characters in attendance; some of them looked old enough to have graduated—or been expelled—years ago, blue-jawed characters with their dirty boots up on the desk. Mitchum managed to hold up his end in a tough crowd. Here, as in Felton, he showed little but contempt for figures of authority, and he was sent home more than once for bad behavior. One time he tossed a firecracker into a tuba during a school concert, right in the middle of the “Poet and Peasant” Overture. And to think the bandleader had earlier encouraged him to join the band and let him take home a saxophone to practice on. His mother learned how to play it herself and then coached him at night. He picked it up fast, as he did so many things, but got bored and dropped it. Years later, in Hollywood, he would sometimes happen upon a sax on a set or at a party and wow people with his unexpected proficiency.

Robert preferred to do his learning in private, on his own terms. He discovered
the palacelike library at Fifth and Forty-second and would stay until closing in the cavernous reading rooms with a stack of books before him—novels, histories, anthropological studies, poetry, biographies. He and his brother loved to explore the city’s museums, returning again and again to the Museum of Natural History especially, imaginations set afire by the exhibits depicting ancient Indian camps, knights in armor, Egyptian mummies, bejeweled swords and daggers. The vivid glimpses of exotic peoples and locales primed a growing wanderlust.

New York offered young Bob another sort of education, heretofore neglected. He and John slept in the kitchen. The original, much larger apartment had been turned into two residences, crudely partitioned with a slab of plywood running next to the kitchen door. At night, with the lights out, the cracks and wormholes in the wood gave them glimpses of the neighboring apartment, rented out to a couple of gin-swilling NYU students. One night there were strange sounds coming through the wall that brought the Mitchum brothers crawling from their cots to investigate. The college boys had company, pickups from a local speak, bootleg hooch was flowing, and soon the quartet were out of their clothes and rolling around in orgiastic celebration while Bob and Jack watched the show from the other side, bumping heads against the cracks. It was like a Tijuana Bible come to life, the boys thought, most informative.

Robert had never had much truck with girls, and they didn’t seem to like him, all skin and bones, indented chin, face like a damn ferret. In any case, rural Delaware was a prim, God-fearing place and had been unlikely to offer much in the way of sensual inducements. New York was another story altogether. In addition to the eye-opening antics seen through the plywood wall, Robert came in close contact with many beautiful and relatively godless women from Annette’s growing circle of Broadway acquaintances, some of them stopping by the apartment for a late night coffee after long hours on the stage. One of these lovelies, friendly and high-spirited, was a stripper currently employed at Minsky’s Burlesque. Feeling sympathy for Annie’s skinny brother when he expressed his dream of someday getting to see such an interesting-sounding show, the young woman arranged to sneak him in one night as her underaged guest. He stood by the backstage door at a prearranged time until out slipped his lovely liaison wearing a long, fur coat, in which she enveloped him and stealthily escorted him into the theater. Fresh from her own appearance on the stage, the lady had nothing on beneath the fur. Robert struggled to keep his balance while bathed in the heat of her luscious femininity. It was a fever-inducing experience, as was the show itself, glimpsed from a discreet nook in the wings. His subsequent inclination toward a showbiz career Robert
would blame on this epochal viewing. “Any boyhood visions of growing up to be a policeman or fireman collapsed right there,” he later confessed. He would return to the burlesque house on a number of occasions during his Manhattan sojourn, becoming friendly with several of the show’s star performers, and it was there—he claimed when anyone had the temerity to inquire—it was there, backstage at Minsky’s, between the lissome thighs of a sympathetic stripteaser, that he would surrender whatever technically remained of his innocence.

It was only with the family’s arrival in New York that Robert began to comprehend the terrible circumstances into which the country had been plunged. In the time since the stock market crash of 1929, the enormous economic downturn had rapidly dismantled great chunks of the social infrastructure across America, upsetting the lives of mllions. Everywhere now was mounting unemployment, dislocation, despair. A city as powerful as New York continued to function much as before, the streets and subways still crowded with gainfully employed citizenry; but the nightmarish effects of the Great Depression had become a citywide specter visible on every block. Mitchum would never forget the haunted-looking beggars skulking around Tmes Square, the cardboard shanties under the bridges and in empty lots, the shivering men lined up in the snow outside a church soup kitchen, waiting hours sometimes for a cup of hot broth and a small hunk of bread. And there were worse things to see: the ones who didn’t survive the hardship, dead from starvation or disease or fear, the bodies lying where they fell until the city could collect them like the day’s trash. “You’d find ’em under the subway steps,” Mitchum remembered, “huddled up and gone.”

His family hung on, barely. They moved to another apartment uptown in the West Nineties, but the rent still came due each month. Ann had to stay home to take care of baby Carol, while the rest did whatever they could to bring in some money. On arrival from Bridgeport, the Major had made the rounds of the Manhattan newspapers and magazines looking for a position, without success. His roster of claimed talents included a clever way with cards, and now and then he would hear of a game going on somewhere and scrounge up fifty cents or so and try and make it grow. Once he actually came back with ten dollars for the kitty. For a time Jack worked as a delivery boy at a market, taking big boxes of groceries to the elegant apartment houses on Central Park South. The temptation to remove some mouthwatering item or two from the deliveries was always mitigated by the fear of losing the job and the dimes that it earned him. They scratched by, hand to mouth. One night the family dinner
consisted of a bag of roasted walnuts one of the boys had stolen from a vendor. Robert found a job jerking sodas at the drugstore of the Astor Hotel on Broadway. He worked for twelve hours on Christmas Day 1931, so the boss treated him to a dinner on the house, a feast it seemed at the time, with his stomach always empty—a hamburger and a chocolate soda.

At fourteen he left home.

“You read these stories that Bob ran away,” said his sister, recalling the events of sixty-seven years earlier. “He didn’t run away. Mother packed his things for him! Like many great minds, artists and visionaries, and Bob was a little bit of all of that, he was curious, wanted to see everything. He had to get out and explore the world. He read everything, and when he learned about interesting things and places, he became so eager to go see them. He’d read a story about the Okefenokee Swamp, or this or that, and he’d say, ‘I’ve just got to go see what that looks like.’ Mother used to read us a little poem, I don’t know who wrote it, and it mentions the ‘great wide wonderful world, so beautifully dressed,’ and Bob just couldn’t wait to go out and see it.”

Mitchum would remember it in less idealistic terms. “I was a poor kid and a lot of trouble. I never got along too well anywhere. Fifth wheel kind of thing . . .

“I got tired of gnawing on chicken necks and hit the road.

“I guess my ambition was . . . to be a bum.”

He had daydreamed about tramps and hoboes the way other boys did about cowboys and airplane daredevils. They were the last great American adventurers, knights of the open road and all that jazz. It was a life Robert had read about, hungrily devoured, in alluring stories and books by Jack London and Jim Tully and others who wrote of train-hopping vagabonds in a world of thrills, danger, and absolute freedom. Tully, in particular, was a kind of private god to Mitchum. The “hobo author,” as he was called, a two-fisted intellectual, proud nihilist, hard-boiled stylist, Tully wrote of social outcasts and bottomrungers, tramps, prizefighters, carnies, orphans. Mitchum read his
Beggars of Lifey
a memoir of Tully’s days as a “road kid”—a young drifter—read it again and again till the type was stained and smeared with dirty fingerprints and pages fell loose from the binding.

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In the early ’30s, history conspired to create a hobo subculture the likes of which Jim Tully could never have imagined in his footloose days. With the Depression spreading across the land, plaguelike, an economic Black Death, hundreds of thousands of jobless and destitute Americans began to leave their homes and families and wander the country in search of work, food, survival. They left in cars, like Steinbeck’s Joads, in trembling jalopies stuffed with their every possession; they tramped and hitchhiked; and in ever-increasing numbers they rode the trains, illegally hopping the freights that crisscrossed every part of the country. Most of the hoboes on the road were adult males, but as the Depression continued into a second and third year, conditions growing worse, families unable to cope and schools being shut down, hordes of children became a part of this desperate, aimless migration as well. There were an estimated 250,000 youths—the so-called wild boys of the road—riding the rails at the height of the Depression.

Crowds of a hundred and more would gather to catch a single freight train, a ragtag army swarming onto the cars as they rolled down the track. Outside rail yards they built encampments, “hobo jungles” they were called, and a few had grown to the size of small towns. Some communities were taking drastic, even violent measures to drive off the scourge of the wandering unemployed. Some among the nation’s wealthy and reactionary feared their anarchic ranks would become an organized revolutionary force, hoboes rising up to attack the banks and factories en masse and topple Herbert Hoover’s government.