Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (58 page)

There were the usual injuries and near disasters. Mitchum took a fall twenty feet down one of the ship’s open metal stairways and landed on the deck on his back. The doctor told him, “Your back’s sort of. . . broken.” He returned to work in a brace. On another day, shooting aboard the destroyer escort
Whitehurst
at sea off the coast of Oahu, Mitchum as the pretend captain signaled the firing of loaded depth charges. The charges misfired or the men at the ash can racks misheard the order, and instead of two charges, nearly a dozen were exploded, making the entire ship convulse, sending everyone on deck tumbling, short-circuiting the engine room, knocking out one engine, and causing a leak.

David Hedison:
“The Enemy Below
was my first film under contract to 20th Century-Fox in 1957. Robert Mitchum had always been one of my favorite actors; and when I first met him on the set, I can remember being a bit awkward, but he very quickly put me at ease. It was Doug McClure’s first film as well, and we were both very proud and happy to be appearing with Mitchum in our very first film—I mean, how lucky can you get? During the course of filming I had a line where I had to bark out a command: ‘Right full rudder!’ I thought I had delivered the line quite well, but Mitchum kept insisting I had said
ruther
not
rudder.
I told him he was wrong, but he wouldn’t let it go, even after seeing it on film. More than thirty years later I bumped into him and his lovely wife, Dorothy, at a restaurant. ‘Well hello,’ I beamed. ‘How have you been?’ ‘Just fine, Al,’ he said, ‘but I’m telling you, you said
ruther?”

The second of the Powell productions was
The Hunters,
based on a superb, cold-blooded novel by James Salter, the story of a warrior breed of jet fighter pilots in the Korean conflict.

“While we used the title,” said writer Wendell Mayes, “what I wrote was from start to finish an original screenplay. There wasn’t anything else to do, because the novel could not be adapted. It was too internal. They do make mistakes in Hollywood in buying material.”

Powell lured Mitchum with a partial script. “It seemed fine to me. I got to fly a fighter plane and spend a lot of time in the Officers’ Club in Japan. ‘And you can go to Japan early and scout it out for a couple of weeks,’ he said. That sounded good, so I said yes. Then he sent me page thirty-one. And I found out my plane crashed and I spent the rest of the film carrying some fellow on my back. ‘You ought to cast that part by the pound,’ I said. ‘What’s Sinatra doing?’ But of course they saddled me with some hulk who got heavier by the minute.” And no trip to Japan. “We did the whole thing on the Fox ranch.”

He had originally planned to do a different Korean war drama,
Battle Hymn,
the story of Col. Dean E. Hess, a minister who became a fighter pilot and killed numerous Asians. Universal offered Mitch the part until the righteous colonel threw a fit. “I cannot possibly allow a man who has been jailed for taking drugs to play me on the screen!” said Hess. Mitchum couldn’t find the piece of paper that said he had been exonerated and so let it pass. Hess happily agreed to have himself portrayed instead by Rock Hudson, whose skeletons, unlike Mitchum’s, were still hermetically closeted.

“You got problems?” asked Robert Mitchum in a flavorful article he penned for the
Hollywood Reporter.
“Well, climb on the pad and tell old Dad. I don’t have any. Or, I didn’t have until producing a picture messed me up. As the man said, ‘It all started with a cloud in the sky no bigger than a man’s fist.’ Home crouched on the couch one night, it occurred to me that we might get a motion picture out of moonshiners and government tax men trying to outwit each other in the southeastern area of these United States.

“Sure, actors have problems, but I’ve found production problems come lower than a hungover snake. . . . “

In fact, Mitchum had been fiddling with the idea of a “moonshine adventure” for years, letting it simmer and take shape in his mind. It was now to become the subject of his first personal production:
Thunder Road.
Although he had influenced the final form of many of his films through the years, writing dialogue, pinch-hit directing, contributing to them in myriad small and large ways—and he’d been the coproducer and uncredited cowriter on
Bandido!
—it had taken him four years since his escape from RKO to take this next important step toward complete creative independence.

He met a smart, affable writer working for Batjac, John Wayne’s production company. James Atlee Phillips was a Texas newspaperman turned mystery novelist (
The Case of the Shivering Chorus Girls, Suitable for Framing)
and a tyro scenarist, a footloose character with a fertile imagination. He and Mitchum hit
it off, and they began discussing the actor’s idea for a movie about the southern moonshine business. Mitchum had worked up a story line concerning an ex-soldier returned to his Smoky Mountain home, running illegal liquor across the state, trying to outwit and outrace the authorities; and another writer, Walter Wise, had done a draft, but it needed a lot of work. Mitchum wanted more details, an inside feel for the milieu. He and Jim Phillips decided they would go to Washington, D.C., on a research trip. Jim had a brother, David Atlee Phillips, a rising star in the CIA. The men from Hollywood came to see him at his office, which Mitchum claimed was located behind a false front, the facade of a brewery. Brother David made some phone calls, smoothing the way for them to meet with officials at the Treasury Department.
^*

Schmoozing officers of the department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division, explaining his desire to make a film documenting their glorious battle against the moonshine menace in the American South, Mitchum came away with a promise of full cooperation for his project. For days he and Phillips pawed through Alcohol and Tobacco’s criminal files and case histories, then carried on their research at the Library of Congress, learning about the ancestry of southern mountain families and spending some time listening to the library’s collection of regional folk music and rare “hillbilly” recordings.

One day Mitchum turned up in Asheville, North Carolina, a scenic crossroads and summer retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was the birthplace of a writer whose work Mitchum had always admired, Thomas Wolfe (Wolfe on Asheville: “. . . the cool sweet magic of starred mountain night, the huge attentiveness of dark, the slope, the trees . . .”), and the town was no stranger to the moonshine trade. Mitchum checked in at the old Battery Park Hotel and, with an introduction and authorization from Washington in his pocket, he telephoned the treasury’s man in Asheville, John Corbin, and asked if they could get together.

“Are you some kinda joker?” said Corbin. “Robert Mitchum the movie man:

A meeting was arranged, and Corbin brought along Al Dowtin, a respected local legend and overachiever, former sports hero, former FBI agent, and champion golfer, now the head of the local ABC (Alcohol Beverage Control) Board.

“I was chief of the law enforcement for the Asheville ABC,” said Dowtin. “The liquor stores had just been voted in in North Carolina, and so liquor sales had just become legal in Asheville at the ABC store; but prior to that the only liquor we had coming in to Asheville, which is a town of fifty-six thousand people, well, it was
illegal.
So mountain liquor—white liquor, corn liquor—was the basic alcohol used by most people. And they did a good business, I would say. There was stills all over them mountains in western North Carolina. About eleven hundred stills. And when I was working with Alcohol Tax we arrested over ten thousand people. You’re asking me how did we find the stills? Well, we would get information. There’s always some good people in a neighborhood who don’t like to see people sellin’ liquor.”

Dowtin sat down with Bob Mitchum and they talked moonshine. “He was just about as down-to-earth a fella as you ever saw. And we talked, and he wanted to know if we could furnish him all the information he wanted on the moonshiners’ tricks and how they operated and all that business. He asked a lot of questions. And o’ course we wanted to help him anyway we could. So we filled him in on everything he wanted to know, told him some adventures. I had some car chases, shot down the tires on a car. Once or twice someone shot at us from up the hill. Most of the time, though, I told him, it was like this; we treated folks right, that was my belief. We’d arrest them, and rather than put handcuffs on ‘em, we’d tell ‘em, ‘Come to the office on Monday and turn yourself in.’ I tell you, we treated people right. . . . See, where you get in trouble in life is treatin’ people wrong.”

Mitchum returned to Hollywood and set about putting together a cast and crew for his moonshine movie. His choice to direct the picture was decidedly unconventional yet emblematic. Sixty-two-year-old Arthur Ripley was an eccentric and mysterious figure in American film circles. To those who had worked with him in the course of his peripatetic forty years in the business, his behavior and appearance had engendered as much comment as his undoubted talent. He was a gloomy presence in his early days and prone to fits of truculent shouting as if, said one observer, “unseen demons were fighting his ideas.” He seldom changed clothes or bathed; and while making a film for Walter
Wanger in the ‘30s, Ripley looked so frighteningly unkempt that intermediaries hid him under blankets when the fastidious producer visited the sets. In the beginning a film editor (he chopped von Stroheim’s
Foolish Wives
from twenty-four reels to fourteen on a train from Los Angeles to New York), then a Mack Sennett gag writer, he partnered with a young Frank Capra in creating a series of features for silent clown Harry Langdon. Ripley, it was said, gave Langdon his “dark” side. Joshua Logan, who codirected a film with him in 1938, declared, “Ripley was a true movie man. . . . He knew everything there was to know. An inspired man, almost a clairvoyant, it took careful knowing to appreciate him.” In 1942, Ripley directed
Prisoner of Japan,
from a story by Edgar Ulmer, completing it in five days; the picture cost $19,000 and made $350,000. His mood-drenched romance of Nazi refugees in the Caribbean,
Voice in the Wind,
took eight days to shoot and the
New York Times
said it contained “more art per linear foot than most Oscar winners.” Ripley made one more feature in the mid-’40s, the great, bizarre film noir
The Chase,
starring Peter Lorre and Steve Cochran, from a novel by Cornell Woolrich. And then . . . mostly unemployment and obscurity. At the time Mitchum went looking for him, it had been over ten years since Ripley had directed anything.

“Anybody else would have tried to get some established director or some hot new talent that everyone was enthusiastic about,” said Reva Frederick. “It was typical of Robert to come up with Ripley. He got these ideas from the back of his head, you didn’t know where. He said he had seen one of the man’s movies years ago, he couldn’t remember it exactly, but he thought that was the sort of guy he wanted.” Mitchum was intrigued by the filmmaker’s outsider rep—he compared him to Nick Ray as another artist “people just didn’t believe in”—and by his legendary economy. “He was a very gifted man and a drinking fellow,” said Mitchum, “a tall, sonorous, big-nose character from Brooklyn, teaching at UCLA when we nailed him.” Said Reva, “We found Arthur Ripley. Oh boy. He was one hundred and ninety years old or looked it. He liked to drink, and when he drank he didn’t know where he was, where he lived, or how to get back home. Robert liked him.”

His next idea was even more inspired, but by no means economical. Mitchum wanted to costar in the film with Elvis Presley. The young musical sensation had appeared in just one film so far,
Love Me Tender,
stealing the picture right out from under the nominal star (and Mitchum’s friend), Richard Egan. In
Thunder Road,
Mitchum wanted Presley to play his character’s upstart young brother.

He showed up at Elvis’s hotel suite one day, with a screenplay in one hand and a fifth of scotch in the other. Members of Presley’s omnipresent posse escorted
him inside to meet the twenty-two-year-old King. Elvis was a confessed fan of Mitchum’s and confided that the actor’s high, upswept hairstyle in one picture had been the inspiration for his own much-talked-about pompadour. Mitchum chuckled, poured himself a drink. They chewed the fat, Bob trotting out some old standards, the escape from the chain gang, snapping hound dogs, and such. Elvis told his friend Russ Tamblyn that Mitchum’s exciting stories had left him “all shook up.”

At last, feeling the two of them had established a pretty good rapport, Mitchum got down to business. “Here’s the fuckin’ script,” he said. “Let’s get together and do it.”

According to Presley’s pal Lamar Fike, a witness to the meeting, Elvis told Mitchum they would have to discuss it with his manager.

Mitchum said, “Fuck, I’m talking to you. I don’t need to talk to your manager. Let’s do the picture.”

“Well, I can’t,” Elvis said. “Not unless the Colonel says I can.”

Colonel Parker didn’t care about sentimental shit like Mitchum’s influential hairdo. The price for Presley was most of
Thunder Road’s
estimated budget, and that was more or less the end of that. Presley did accept an invitation to come over to the Mandeville house one weekend. Young Chris Mitchum, used to seeing famous faces drop by and pretty blase about it, was stunned by the visit. Gregory Peck, Jane Russell, these people were just . . . neighbors. Here was a star! Presley ate roast beef at the dinner table, then played the piano and sang and did a couple of duets with his host. Bob’s stock climbed several points in his children’s
eyes.

Mitchum’s oldest son, sixteen-year-old Jim, had sprouted up to his father’s size and was getting bigger, and people often joked that they looked like twins. Bob decided to give him a taste of the family business and cast him to play Luke’s young brother, offering him a minimum salary of $280 a week. “I’m a producer first and a father second,” Mitchum said. Other roles went to Gene Barry (the federal lawman), Jacques Aubuchon (the gangster villain), Mitch Ryan and Peter Breck (young punks), and to singer and Las Vegas lounge sensation Keely Smith, making her acting debut as Luke’s chanteuse girlfriend. “Robert had come into the office one day some time before,” said Reva, “and he said, ‘I have heard the greatest record of all time!’ He was just crazy about that record, Louis Prima and this girl he said had a great voice, Keely Smith. So fade out, and now we’re casting
Thunder Road
and Robert says, ‘Let’s see if we can talk to Keely Smith about the part.’ He wanted her and that was that. He had a theory that anyone who could sing, who could deliver a lyric, could act. This didn’t turn out to be correct, but she was a very nice lady.”