Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (7 page)

He was taken to the Chatham County Camp No. 1, located in the middle of some hades called Pipemaker Swamp. The mosquitoes were as big as your fist and the swamp rats the size of dogs. It was a chain gang. You wore a metal clamp around your ankles through which they ran a heavy chain connecting you in lines of five prisoners to a chain. At dawn they marched you into a truck and took you to work at hard labor repairing the roads outside Savannah. The sheriff’s department rented its charges to the city for a small profit. It was nothing unusual for those times. Mitchum had heard that in Texas they sold you outright to labor camps, and what became of you after that was none of their concern.

“It wasn’t particularly hard to take. I got fed, you know. I guess it was depressing. The first night, I slept on the floor and the guy next to me was dyin’ of a tubercular hemorrhage.”

The clamp on his leg had been fastened too tight and bit through his flesh. A pustulant ulceration developed. Nobody gave a damn. Every prisoner there was hurt or sick with something. He calculated that there were at least four different virulent diseases making the rounds among his fellow miscreants. Nobody gave a shit. They weren’t running a hospital there, a guard told a guy lagging back, coughing up his insides. There was work to be done. One of the other prisoners told Robert that sometimes if the state needed the labor they would extend your sentence, just make up some infraction and give you another thirty days. Assessing these factors, Mitchum saw no future in chain gang road repair. He got the lowdown on running away. In fact, it was a cinch to take off when you were out on the work detail. The new road bordered the swamp and the trees, and they took the chains off your legs while you worked. They would shoot at you and maybe chase you for a while, but after that nobody would spend sixty cents to try and catch you. They’d just go out and round up someone to take your place. That was all there was to an escape attempt:
you either got away or you got a bullet. Out on the highway one of the captains in charge of the work detail was an older man named Captain Fry. He had jaundice, maybe hepatitis: his flesh was the color of margarine, and flecks of bile floated across his eyeballs. He would sit on a camp chair with a .30-.30 rifle on his lap, muttering to himself in the sun. “I don’ know what he sees through them eyes,” a fellow prisoner told Robert, “but I know he blowed a man’s head off last month.” Still, Mitchum thought the jaundiced captain was the best bet, and one afternoon after the sun had dropped behind the trees and the captain was sitting and distracted with chatting to himself, Mitchum turned and ran into the woods. He heard a rifle crack and thought he felt the bullet whizzing alongside his ear. He heard voices shouting and someone blowing a whistle and another rifle shot, and then he was in the thick of the woods and he was gone.

He hitchhiked out of Georgia and up to Baltimore, living for some days in an abandoned house with a gang of derelict youths trying to make a living from dog-napping, snatching the family pooches from wealthy neighborhoods and then returning them when a reward was posted. An infection in his ankle had spread to most of his lower leg. It was swollen and purple and hurt like hell. He covered the open sores with a bandage made from rags, and each time he unwrapped it to take a look it had added a few more colors and pustules. He began to think he might have been bitten by a poisonous snake back in the swamp and wondered if there was an antidote available. He lay on the floor of the old house while his new pals were out stealing dogs. His leg throbbed and he tried to keep from crying. He wrote some lines on the back of a postcard that he intended to mail to his mother: “Trouble lies in sullen pools along the road I’ve taken. . . .”

After some days and the leg getting only worse, he decided to try and get home. The folks were back in Delaware now, though not at the farm. He hitched his way north, though with his pants leg torn open and his calf covered in wet red bandages not many people wanted to give him a lift. At last in Pennsylvania a doctor picked him up and after looking over the leg and giving Robert some pain pills drove him all the way to his mother’s address in the town of Rising Sun. Bob was white-faced and delirious when they carried him in, John would remember, and his leg looked like a festering tree stump. The doctor told Ann that the swollen, infected limb was full of poison and it would end up killing him if it continued to spread. “If you love your son,” the doctor said, “the best thing is to get him to the hospital and get that leg taken off.”

Ann wouldn’t do it. She hated to see Bob suffering, but she couldn’t drag him down to some charity ward and let them saw off his leg. Grabbing up a basket, she set off into the woods that began just behind the house. She was gone for hours, carefully picking out leaves and wild herbs, filling the basket, coming home scratched and mud-spattered. From the dampened and dirty ingredients she made a poultice and applied it to the wounded leg. “She made another and another,” said Annette, “for two days, constantly changing the dressing and drawing the poisons out. And knowing Mother, she probably never slept the whole time. And in the end the poison had been all drained and the fever and swelling began to go down. And my brother kept his leg.”

In Robert’s absence, the Mitchum clan’s sojourn in New York had come to an end. There was little work on Broadway these days, and Annette had gone to join her husband, now transferred to Long Beach, California. Left to depend on themselves, the Major and his family were unable to meet even their minimal expenses in Manhattan and soon abandoned the city to live again with Grandmother Petrine and the Tetreaults in rural Delaware. Things were hardly better there. The farm had gone under, and now everyone lived together in an improvised apartment on the ground floor of a fundamentalist church in the tiny community of Rising Sun. Uncle Bill took whatever odd jobs he could find to put food on the table, but resources were stretched thin even before the arrival of Ann and her brood, men, women, and children crammed one on top of the other in the tiny set of rooms. It was worse than the chain gang, Robert thought, but for now there was no place else to go.

His bad leg had become so raw and weak that it would take a month and more to heal. He hated being confined to the sorry, overcrowded apartment, and when Uncle Bill carved out a crutch for him to hobble around on, he eagerly went off in search of whatever excitement a hobbling fifteen-year-old boy could find in Rising Sun and environs. Jack was a young man now, strong and handsome. Away from his brother’s shadow, in recent months he had begun to come into his own, doing well as a student at Caesar Rodney High in nearby Camden. He was an athlete, a good student, a popular boy with new pals and a string of girlfriends. Briefly—and for the last time—the hierarchy was reversed, the older brother tagging along with the younger. Robert sat on the sidelines, watched his brother play football, met his buddies. Jack had female friends now, too. One girl he knew was a pretty and slender brunette with dark eyes, a sweet and soft-spoken thirteen-year-old by the name of Dorothy Spence. They had met at school that autumn and were just getting to know
each other. They had walked and talked together and shared a soda or two. Not exactly dates or intimate encounters like those with some other local girls he knew, a few of whom had gone behind the corn shed with him and kissed and played games, but it wasn’t for lack of interest on Jack’s part. “My heart was hers,” he said of Dottie Spence, and he had every intention of getting to know her better as the season progressed. And then, one afternoon at Voshal’s Mill Pond outside Camden, a swimming hole and hangout for the local schoolkids, he made the mistake of introducing her to brother Bob.

To be perfectly honest, Dorothy would say in the years ahead, when asked to recall that momentous first encounter, she hadn’t liked him. He was a smart aleck, he cursed, he told rude stories, he was rather scrawny and odd-looking, like an overgrown urchin in his baggy old clothes, and hopping about on a poorly made crutch. She was friendly and polite and took his teasing good-naturedly because she did like his better-behaved brother, but once Dorothy Spence left the boys for home that afternoon, she didn’t give Jack Mitchum’s older sibling another thought.

Robert, by grand contrast, experienced an immediate and profound attraction to his brother’s dark-eyed, soft-spoken female friend, though typically he disguised his feelings behind a veil of wisecracking indifference. He returned to Rising Sun that day in a state of anxious excitement, moonstruck. All evening he could think of nothing but the girl by the pond, and that night in bed, crouched over one of Jack’s school composition books, he scribbled poetry in a Byronic frenzy, a strange outburst of passionate feeling for a person he had known for one afternoon. “All my lonely life I’ve loved you lovely stranger,” the boy wrote that night.

How to account for such sudden and, as it would prove, unwavering commitment to a largely unknown object of desire? “Love at first sight—ever hear of it?” said his sister. “Real love is always mysterious. Who are we to try and understand it?” Robert’s own recorded assessment was bluntly deterministic and even more to the point: “She was it,” he said. “And that was that.”

All that remained was for someone to tell Dorothy about it.

Robert pursued her all that autumn and winter. He would find his way to Caesar Rodney in the afternoons and wait to see her come out of school, and on Saturdays he would take the bus or hike three miles out to the Spence family home in Camden. He would drag John along for company (at first miffed at
the woman-stealing antics of his “rapscallion” brother, Jack soon recognized the singular nature of Bob’s pursuit). They would sit on the curb outside the Spence place and wait for Dottie to come out and join them, and then Jack the chaperone would sit there bored stiff and twiddling his thumbs while the other two whispered and giggled in each other’s ears.

It was flattering to be the object of such great interest. Boys Dottie’s age were not ordinarily so serious or so romantic. The more she saw of Bob Mitchum, the more she came to revise her initial low opinion of him. Indeed, she came to realize that Bob was a most unusual and exceptional young man, funny and kind and intelligent. He was a poet, of all things, who knew the most beautiful, strange words, and an orator who could recite Shakespeare by heart. He was a colorful and worldly person, too, only a couple of years older than she was, but he had traveled all over and done exciting things, and though his stories of New York City and riding freights and going to jail were often shocking and embarrassing to hear, they were terribly impressive. Robert made everyone else she knew in Delaware look awfully dull by comparison.

He was a little too colorful for some, including her parents, hard-working, middle-class folks who ran a general store in the town and who were not thrilled at their daughter’s friendship with a once and future hobo (they were understandably prevented from hearing of his criminal conviction and time spent on the chain gang). Not by nature a rebellious child, Dorothy hated to disappoint or distress her mother and dad. But she did not stop seeing the boy, and her feelings for him continued to improve until one Saturday night on a double date with his cousin Gilbert and another girl, riding around in Gilbert’s car, talking and laughing, an absolutely ordinary Saturday night she would remember forever only because it was the night she knew for certain that she was in love.

She was just thirteen years old, Robert would say in her defense, the age when young girls fall for derelicts.

He worked for a while as an apprentice mechanic in a local garage. Then, in the summer of 1933, not yet sixteen and lying about his age, he became one of the first volunteers for the Civilian Conservation Corps, an employment program created by newly elected Pres. Franklin Roosevelt. An innovative attempt to create jobs for some among the millions left unemployed by the Depression, FDR’s CCC put young men to work on federal land projects and emergency relief assignments, simple physical jobs mostly, paying thirty dollars a month. Robert was assigned with a few hundred other enlistees to a tideland reclamation
project and spent several months toting trees and shoveling dirt for ten hours each day. It was not much different from the chain gang, really. They didn’t even let you keep your wages, sending all but five bucks per month directly home to your family. The months of steady, hard labor became a transformative experience—by the end of that first tour of duty in Roosevelt’s “tree army” Robert had lost the skinny frame of his youth, returning home a strikingly powerful physical specimen with thick-muscled arms and broad shoulders.

The Mitchum-Morris-Tetreault-Gunderson clan had a new plan for survival. Annette’s dispatches from Long Beach had painted a rosy and tempting picture of a Garden of Eden by the Pacific. It was easy, warm, abundant, everything that Rising Sun was not. With another Delaware winter ahead and no end to their hopeless, raffish condition in sight, it was decided to pull up stakes once more and move out to blessed-sounding California.

The family prepared for an autumn hegira, pooling their resources to buy an old flivver for the long ride west. Robert decided to head out before them, bumming his way to California, and Jack excitedly accepted his invitation to come along. Bob and Dottie had been going steady for months, and his restless nature was well known to her by now.

“I’ll be back for you,” Robert said. “I don’t know how long it will take. But I’ll be back.”

Ann packed the bindles for her two boys, with going-away presents of new socks and handkerchiefs. They left Delaware in July with a friend Robert had made in the CCC, Carroll Davis, an Alabama boy returning home. In the New York City produce market they hooked up with a trucker headed for Florida, and with some hiking and another hitched ride made their way to Davis’s hometown outside Birmingham, where the Mitchum boys spent a few days feeding on southern hospitality. Well rested and with their bellies full, Bob and Jack bid farewell to Carroll and his family and moved along, heading down the road with their thumbs out. Rides proved hard to come by on the southern byways that summer, and the boys found themselves on a most circuitous route to California. A sedan carrying three raucous mountaineers picked them up, then took them far off course on a bruising sidetrack that began with the purchase of three jugs of moonshine from a backwoods still. Generously the roving mountaineers shared the white lightnin’ with the two young hitchhikers, Bob and Jack availing themselves till their eyes clouded over. The events of the next few days became a blur of festive and life-threatening behavior. One night
in a hillside motor court the brothers were stirred from a drunken stupor by the sound of gunfire. The mountaineers had gotten into a regular Hatfield and McCoy contretemps with some other gang of hillbillies, and soon there were pistols and shotguns roaring from either side of the court. Bob and Jack crouched under a bed as window glass shattered and wood splinters flew through the air. They would look up through their fingers and catch glimpses of their drunken driver happily shooting at the unseen assailants. Eventually there was a ceasefire or a lull in the action, everyone scrambled into the sedan, and they tore out of there and didn’t look back. The trip ended in a mountain settlement straight out of
‘L’ilAbner,
old ladies smoking corncob pipes, goats in the road, young beauties bursting out of dresses made from ripped flour sacks. There was more moonshine on tap. Jack would remember them waking up this time in a muddy pen being poked at by curious razorback hogs.