Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (69 page)

“Read this,” she said, thrusting an unfolded letter before him.

John perused the letter. It was from Robert. In high-flown prose he described to her a painful, native loneliness he dared not ask her to share.

What did it mean? she wanted to know.

Assuming that honesty and utter frankness were the best policies, John told her it was “the kiss-off.”

Sad to say, he had heard about similar letters forty, fifty times before. John told author George Eells that his brother went “into this deep, expansive, profound reasoning why he can’t see them anymore, because he doesn’t really want to get involved. . . . When it comes down to the decision, Dorothy always wins hands down. Talk about a con artist.”

As John recalled it, MacLaine heard his blunt explanation, roared,
“That son of a bitch!”
and flung one of her high heels in the direction of the television set, which as it happened, in the way of a good Mitchum brothers story, was just then midway through a broadcast of
One Minute to Zero,
starring brother Bob.

“Robert had . . . a tremendous fondness and love for Shirley,” said Reva Frederick. “Under certain circumstances it would have . . . what should I say. . . could have culminated in something permanent. And he was very unhappy that something could not be done about a particular situation. He adored her. But he was not free to go further.”

“Why couldn’t he get free?”

“There was a hold on him. Maybe it was within his own mind. But he couldn’t do it.”

“Obviously you mean something to do with his marriage. Was this a general feeling he had, or are you saying there was some specific reason he felt he could not leave Dorothy?”

“Yes. Yes. A specific reason. I don’t want to get that personal. I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone. Too many people still alive.”

“Is this reason he stayed married . . . this
hold
he felt. . . is it something . . . is it a key to understanding Robert’s character?”

“Oh, no. No. Oh, no, you’ll never understand that. I don’t know that anyone ever did.”

From the moment he first read Arthur Miller’s screenplay of
The Misfits,
John Huston wanted Robert Mitchum for the lead opposite Miller’s wife, Marilyn Monroe. The character of the existential “last cowboy” was a perfect part for Bob, Huston thought, and the director looked forward to continuing the creative and personal alliance forged in those balmy tropical days and nights on Tobago. He tracked Mitchum to Dublin and sent him the script. Mitchum thought the thing made no sense at all but read with interest the scenes of the hero wrestling with wild horses on the desert flatlands of Nevada. Huston had nearly killed him the last time, Mitchum thought, and this looked like it would be his second opportunity. He alerted his secretary that if the director called, “Tell him I died.” The part went to Clark Gable—who did die shortly after completing the film. Many said it was in large part due to the physical demands of
The Misfits
as well as the endless aggravations of working with Monroe. Mitchum would later regret his decision. Perhaps the great Gable—with whom he had spent many a pleasant evening over an open bottle—would still be around. And Marilyn—she was soon gone, too. Sad, scrambled child. Perhaps he could have helped out there as well, keeping an eye on her, bringing her back to earth with another slap on the ass. He liked to think he was one of the ones, the last few, she really trusted.

It was some time before he saw Huston again, crossing his path in a hotel bar in London. John gave him the reproving fish eye.

“I’m pretty disappointed in you, Bob,” he said. “Turning me down like that.”

Mitchum said, “What are you doing with that creature, John?”

Huston had a little pet monkey with him at the bar. The monkey’s red-striped penis was extended and the director was plucking at it as he stood there, a drink in his other hand.

Huston smiled. “Well, kid, I think he likes it. . . . “

All was forgiven, the friendship continued. Huston soon offered him a small role—a guest starring appearance—in his delightful, gimmick-ridden mystery thriller,
The List of Adrian Messenger
(the leads going to George C. Scott as the detective and Kirk Douglas as the villainous master of disguise). The film was full of cameos by an assortment of famous name “suspects”—Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis—supposedly hiding under pounds of makeup, their identity to be revealed as each man ripped off his wig and rubber face in a jaunty epilogue. Mitchum was, in fact, the only one of the guest stars to actually play a real part—a scheming Englishman in a wheelchair who gets dumped into the river, making good use of the East End accent with which he had impressed Charles Laughton back in Maryland. “He was marvelous,” said Huston.

Not long afterward, Mitchum considered another and more intriguing collaboration with the man. He read a play Huston had written in his youth,
Frankie and Johnny,
a flowery, hard-boiled dramatization of the lurid folk tale of love and murder—originally written for marionettes, no less. Mitchum wanted to make a film of it (with humans, not puppets), not starring but directing and producing. It would be set in ‘20s Chicago, with a lot of period blues and South Side jazz on the soundtrack and a few original songs by Johnny Mercer. He wanted Nelson Algren, author of
The Man With the Golden Arm,
to write a screenplay. The idea, of course, came to nothing.

The urge to direct a picture came upon him every now and then. Watching all the incompetents and dullards he found himself working with was its own sort of inspiration. Better me than let that guy waste someone’s money again, he would say. “Most directors would be more gainfully employed sitting at Schwab’s drugstore reading the
Hollywood Reporter
over somebody else’s shoulder.” But then he would imagine actually having to arrive on the set before anybody else, or sitting in a room for months with a
cutter
 . . . or having to look at
dailies.
It gave him the creeps just thinking about it.

Max Youngstein, associated with Mitchum as a producer and executive at United Artists in the ‘50s, became more closely allied with the actor when he married Mitchum’s good right hand, Reva Frederick. Working under the aegis of Mitchum’s production company (newly renamed Talbot Productions after the home county in Maryland), Youngstein became interested in a property, a novel by Howard Fast called
The Winston Affair.
It was a story set in India during World War II, concerning the trial of a psychotic American lieutenant accused of murdering a British soldier. He thought it would make a compelling
and exotic courtroom drama on film and that the character of the ambivalent American defense attorney would be a nice change of pace for his star. Mitchum agreed to do it, but by then they found that the rights had already been optioned to Marlon Brando’s Pennybaker Productions. As it turned out, Brando himself was not interested in the project, which came to be titled
Man in the Middle,
but his company had to make something to maintain their legitimacy for tax purposes. Producer and Brando’s business partner Walter Seltzer explained, “Pennybaker had to validate itself, and Marlon didn’t want to work. We had optioned Howard Fast’s book, and Max Youngstein came to me and said, ‘You beat me to it. Can we throw in together?’”

Youngstein and Seltzer flew to London to meet with Mitchum, then finishing his chores on
Adrian Messenger.
Seltzer: “And that first meeting was the one time for me when Mitchum lived up to his reputation as something of the playboy of the Western world and beyond. It was at the Savoy Hotel in London. He was drunk. So drunk he walked out of his shower and out of his hotel room and wandered down the hallway and into the elevator, naked. Completely starkers. I think he said he was trying to get a cup of coffee. It kind of startled me—as well as everybody else who was a resident at the Savoy Hotel. A waiter and a valet took him and ushered him back to his room.”

After working with Brando for several years, Seltzer was no stranger to eccentric behavior, though Mitchum’s nature walk did give him pause. “But as it turned out, once we got started he proved to be a professional in every respect. He was on time, knew his lines, and didn’t make any trouble. There was only one occasion when he held up production and that was to take a call from Shirley MacLaine in New York. They had a romance going on. He just broke away in the middle of shooting a scene to talk to her for a half hour and didn’t care about anything else. But he couldn’t enjoy the conversation much because I came and stood at his elbow, looking at my watch the whole time. Otherwise, he was a great professional and very helpful to the film as a whole. Bob was very good with France Nuyen, who was a little unsure of herself, and he did a lot to help her performance and boost her confidence. He was not quite as much help with Trevor Howard, who could be . . . odd.”

Mitchum had been all for hiring his old buddy Trevor. The two—who first met in Mexico in the ‘50s while one was shooting
Bandido!
and the other was finishing
Run for the Sun
with Richard Widmark and Jane Greer—had had their share of adventures through the years, and Mitchum was, besides, a great admirer of the man’s acting talent. However, Howard had been all but black-balled of late due to his drinking.

“He had a bum reputation then,” said Walter Seltzer. “But he wanted this
job very badly; and Guy Hamilton, the director, and I went out to visit him. He was with his wife, a lovely actress named Helen Cherry. And he was demonstrating to us that he was clean and sober. He very dramatically showed us that he was having tea while the rest of us were swilling drinks. And he did convince us he would be OK, and of course he was a fine, fine actor, and perfect for this role of a military doctor.”

The problem with putting Mitchum and Howard together on a picture was that Bob could drink for days on end and still work, but Trevor could have two belts and lose all control. On Howard’s second day on the film, he and Mitchum had done some private conferring before they were called to the stage. The Englishman was helped up to a platform on the courtroom set that had been rigged so a camera could shoot from a very low angle below his feet. It was soon discovered that Howard was very clearly wearing one brown sock and one white sock, and when this was pointed out to him, along with the fact that they could not shoot a British major in such attire, he went into a drunken fit, screaming, threatening all who approached, absolutely refusing to change his socks.

“I got a frenzied call to come to the set,” said producer Seltzer. “Trevor was up there on this platform, really stoned, acting like he was under siege because they wanted to change his socks. And there was Mitchum, watching it all, very amused.”

Guy Hamilton, who had not yet made his remarkable ‘60s spy movies,
Goldfinger
and
Funeral in Berlin,
had directed big Hollywood personages once before, filming
The Devils Disciple
with Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. “My pleasure and joy in working with Bob Mitchum,” Hamilton recalled, “was in direct contrast to my previous experience with Hollywood stars. I still think of him as one of my favorite people, both as an actor and as a human being. I found him to be extremely professional for the ten, twelve weeks we were together. Always knew his lines, always helpful, never complained about anything. That was his approach to everything. Why make waves? As an actor Bob understood the importance of listening, which is very, very rare for American stars—they’re the world’s worst listeners. Bob listened very carefully. And if all else failed in a scene, you knew you could always fall back on Mitchum’s reaction shots, which could say more than the dialogue. Also, Bob was an amazing sight reader. It was like a magic trick. I used to arrive in the morning with pages of script I’d rewritten overnight. I’d say, ‘Bob, I’m sorry about this, but the dialogue is all changed.’ I was expecting all sorts of troubles. And he would
look at it and say, ‘OK, that’s fine. Great.’ And he knew it all. And he knew everybody else’s part. Tremendously helpful. The continuity girl didn’t have to work because if anybody dried up on a line, Bob could read it to them from memory. He was a very generous actor and was enormously helpful with the less experienced members of the cast.

“I was very impressed with Bob as a person. He was huge when he stuck his gut out and walked around with that extraordinary sort of puffed-up pigeon chest of his. But he was a very gentle soul. A very liberal human being and quite modest. He liked to pretend that he was an idiot. And he was very happy pretending to the world that he was a moron, because it made life simpler. He could be left in peace and quiet. But he was a very bright human being. And, oh yes, he played a mean saxophone. We had a dummy band on the set—a recording played the actual music—and the instruments were left around. And Bob had wandered off into a corner with the abandoned saxophone, and I discovered him there, blowing away . . . a real mean, jazzy saxophone. Just wonderful.”

With the filming of interiors at Elstree Studios efficiently concluded, it was belatedly decided to send Mitchum, Hamilton, and a small crew to India for a week, a kind of glorified second-unit shooting miscellaneous atmosphere and background shots in the streets and buildings of New Delhi. “We were not there very long, but it was a tough location,” said Walter Seltzer. “I don’t think anyone was prepared for the amount of dirt and squalor we encountered. Most everybody got sick—I didn’t and Mitchum did not—alcohol might very well have helped there—but the rest of the crew reacted very badly to some of the bugs that one picks up. We had a number of dinners we were invited to, one at the British ambassador’s house, and some other special evenings with the local dignitaries. And Bob went and behaved just fine, a fine representative of America. Bob was a consummate performer, and he knew when he could turn it off and when he had to behave.”

On one of these “special” evenings, Mitchum claimed, he became the fixation of a maharajah’s daughter, and the two reconvened in his hotel suite that night for a lengthy discussion of Hindu erotic art and other pertinent matters. Mitchum’s driver, meanwhile, introduced him to the delectably powerful sub-continental strains of grass and hashish.