Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (72 page)

Though the new version of
El Dorado
was mostly complete on paper and Leigh Brackett was in Tucson finishing it up, the relationship between what they filmed on a given day—or night—and anything written in the script was often tenuous. Hawks had a relaxed and semi-improvisatory approach to the work. “You have to run the thing,” he said. “You have to tell them what to
do . . . but they do it their own way and in doing so lead you into many, many things.” He liked to sidle up to scenes, handing actors a revised line or two, giving them the freedom to get comfortable with their parts and make something unexpected happen. And sometimes, when nothing happened, that was all right, too. It was just a movie. Mitchum got a kick out of Hawks’s studied casualness. He did an amusing imitation of him that involved standing silently at length, staring portentously, holding his chin as he pondered, then telling everybody they could go home for the day.

“Hawks was not like some of these directors, watching the clock, yelling and screaming,” said Robert Donner, who played Milt, one of El Dorado’s sleazier bad guys. “He took things at his own pace, had his own way of doing things. And Howard thought nothing of closing down the show and taking everybody down across the border into Mexico to eat at some restaurant he liked.
^*

“The idea with Howard was to make a good picture but have a good time doing it. He didn’t drive himself crazy with the little details. That’s how you got that business with Mitchum holding the crutch under the wrong leg in some scenes—crutch keeps switching left to right in different scenes. So they stuck a piece of dialogue in there—’Don’t you know which leg you got shot in?’ or something. That was a result of the fact that Hawks saw the mistake and said, ‘Hell, the audience won’t give a damn. We’re not gonna go back and reshoot for that.’”

Mitchum liked Hawks’s way of working—it was what he ended up doing on his own on many films anyway, trying to get something halfway real out of dreadful scripts; but now it was done in a spirit of calm and of communal creativity, not desperation. Since nobody, including Hawks, had a real strong idea where it was all going from day to day—the script was “written in sand” as one cast member put it—there were some false starts. Mitchum had begun playing his soused sheriff—J. P. Harrah, “a tin star with a drunk pinned on it”—for realism, making him pathetic and terrifying. Hawks said, “Well, that’s the way Dean Martin did it. What else have you got?” And so Mitchum went in another direction, to a broad comic style, mugging and doing pratfalls that had cast and crew in stitches. It was so well received that Mitchum set a new tone for the proceedings (Hawks liked to say he was happy to turn any picture into a comedy if he could). The film went into areas of pure farce at times (according to Hawks, James Caan, as the annoyingly callow youth Mississippi, never knew his part had turned into a comic one or he’d have “tried to be funny”; Caan said he
did
figure it out, and you can tell because he starts smiling after every line).

“You know, it got where I could read what Hawks was thinking,” said Paul Helmick. “And when it came time to turn the camera on Mitchum the first day, he added so much to the scene that when it was over Hawks turned to me and I looked back at him, and he was so happy, like the cat that [sic] swallowed the canary. Because he knew damn well now that he had done the right thing in hiring Mitchum.”

“It was the first time I’d worked with Mitchum,” Hawks said. “I enjoyed it. The first time I work with a good actor I have fun finding things for them to do. You remember that scene in the bath tub? Well, it was Mitchum’s idea that when the girl walked past,
he’d
pull the hat over
his
eyes. I laughed as hard as anybody. You can hear the crew laughing on the soundtrack because nobody knew he was going to do it. Those things are just marvelous.”

Hawks said, “Any time you get somebody who’s as good as Wayne and Mitchum, you’re going to make better scenes than there are in the script. Because they’re damn good, those two people are together.”

Some weeks into the filming the director cornered Mitchum and told him, “You know, you’re the biggest fraud I’ve ever met in my life.”

Mitchum cocked a grin. “How come?”

Hawks said, “You pretend you don’t care a damn thing . . . and you’re the hardest-working so-and-so I’ve ever known.”

Mitchum said, “Don’t tell anybody.”

“Hawks and Mitchum worked together just great, as I thought they would,” said Paul Helmick. “Bob did a wonderful job on that picture. And I don’t think he took a drop the whole picture. Now I’m not saying he didn’t enjoy himself. I remember, a couple of days after we got started in Tucson, before an afternoon call, I was sitting at the table with Wayne and Hawks, we were eating our lunch. Mitchum walked in with one of the best-looking girls I ever saw in my life. I think she was some girl from the local college, a teenager. And he came over to us at the table and said, very straight-faced, ‘Fellas, I’d like to introduce what’s-her-name here. She’ll be with us for the entire picture. She is my new drama coach.’ And then he escorted her away. And Wayne made some crack, and Hawks laughed. And I said, ‘This picture is going to be fun.’”

“Mitch was really a nifty guy,” said Robert Donner. “Working with him, he
was always, you know, saying, ‘I could not fucking care less,’ but he was always the one who was letter perfect, knew exactly what was needed, what was going on.

“Mitch and Duke got along great, worked real well together, but they were different types of people. Duke was wonderful, and he loved the people that he worked with all the time. But Wayne was always ready to tell you what to do, grab you by the shoulders and put you where he wanted you, tell you how to say a line.” One night, Mitchum recalled, Wayne was sitting outside his trailer putting his wig on. He said, “Goddamn it, Mitch, when are gonna let me direct you in a picture?” Mitchum said, “Duke, that’s all you do anyway.”

“Wayne could get a hard-on against somebody,” said Donner. “Duke didn’t care for John Gabriel, who was one of the nicest guys that ever walked. (Gabriel: “I walked between Wayne and the camera, and he sort of manhandled me to show me you don’t do that to John Wayne. But later he apologized and complimented my acting. Which was nice of him.”) And he didn’t like Ed Asner, always called him ‘that New York actor.’ What the hell he had against Ed I don’t know. And Duke loved to argue about politics. He would sit sipping tequila with the still photographer, Phil Stern, and it was hours of ‘goddamn liberals’ this and Stern telling him ‘goddamn conservatives’ that.

“Mitchum was a lot more easygoing. You could play around with Mitch and didn’t have to worry you had overstepped your bounds. He was very generous with the other actors. I remember him whispering something to Adam Rourke—they didn’t know I could hear them—and making sure Adam got to shine in the scene. . . . And when the work was done, he was a lot of fun. He and old Arthur Hunnicutt were a riot together, sitting around remembering stories from the old days. Arthur had been quite a drinker in his day, and he still drank on days when he wasn’t working. His idea of a martini was half gin and half vermouth, and he had it poured into what they called a bucket glass.”

For nearly two months, shooting “night for night,” the
El Dorado
company worked the graveyard shift. Work began around five, and dinner would be served at about ten, then filming would be resumed—some nights until they “ran out of dark.” The actors and crew would try to sleep during the day, but it was difficult to adjust to the odd hours. Robert Donner: “You had breakfast at. . . I don’t know when the hell we’d have breakfasts. You got so screwed up with the hours, you didn’t know what time it was after a while. You just knew when the sun went down you were supposed to start working.” During the night, many actors would slip off under a wagon or onto an unlit porch on the Old Tucson street and try and catch a nap, though it was hardly restful knowing that Hawks might be looking for you at any moment. “Mr. Hawks was
spontaneous, always changing things,” said John Gabriel, playing the varmint Pedro. “So you just had to hang around because you never knew when he would need you for a scene.”

Donner: “I remember lying there on the street behind the wardrobe. It was getting to me, staying up all night every night. I sat up all of a sudden and screamed, ‘I can’t take this anymore!’ And Jim Davis, stretched out near me, lifted his hat back and said, ‘Aw, stop it, if you were home you’d be on unemployment anyway. Go back to sleep.’ So I went back to sleep.”

On a normal work night the actors might be dismissed at about 2
A.M.
While some slid into bed at that point, others went looking for whatever entertainment might be had in Tucson Old or New at two o’clock in the morning. There were poker and blackjack games in the rooms. And for those who were up to interpersonal relations, there were a pair of local girls, possibly cousins, known affectionately as Filthy Phyllis and Rotten Ruth, who loved movie actors very much. The bar at the Ramada Inn, where most of the company stayed, could usually be kept open under special dispensation. One week there was a contingent of rowdy Lufthansa pilots in town for training. Seizing half the bar for a private Oktoberfest, they delighted in cutting off the ties and other articles of clothing from anyone walking near, pinning them to the bar, and generally acting like drunken morons. One night a bunch of the
El Dorado
guys were heading for a card game when Mitchum veered off, saying, “I’m going to the bar and check out the heinies.” He was going to mess it up with the Lufthansa guys. Everybody rolled their eyes and went the other way. It was some time later when Mitchum showed up at the card game in Ed Asner’s room, and he wasn’t alone. Casual as can be, like nothing was out of the ordinary, Mitchum had a German tucked under his arm. Seeing a Lufthansa pilot in a headlock, people in the room shouted, “Hey, Bob, let that guy go!” Mitchum said, “Oh, he’s all right. We came to play some cards.’”

Bob Donner recalled, “With the German in the headlock he comes over and sits down at the table. Keeps the German’s head tucked under his arm—the guy’s on his knees now—and starts playing a hand. And Mitch’d lift the cards and he’d let the guy see and he’d say, ‘What do you think, heinie? Should we hit?’

“A little later things got pretty rowdy and there was a beating on the wall. And Ed Asner says, ‘Jesus, guys, keep it down, for god’s sake! Hawks is sleeping in the next room!’ And it quieted down for a while, and then Bob or somebody would start something and the noise would start. All of a sudden we hear BAM! BAM! BAM! from outside. And everybody runs to the door. And there’s Hawks in his long John pajamas with a six-shooter, firing away. And he
says, ‘Goddamn it! If I see anybody not in their bed in five minutes they’re on the goddamn plane out of here!’ And it was like rats in the night, everybody scurrying!”

The company departed Tucson for Los Angeles on November 22 and continued shooting on the Paramount lot until the end of January 1966, wrapping up some three weeks and a half million dollars over the original estimate. In April, in Palm Springs, Hawks screened a preview for friends and family. His son told him, “A sheriff shouldn’t sing,” and so the director cut a jailhouse musical number with Mitchum singing and Arthur Hunnicutt playing harmonica. The film opened in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, at the end of the year but was held back until the summer of ‘67 for its American release. It was a smash everywhere it played; and in Paris, where Hawks had become a brand name like Hitchcock, the lines ran around the block all day and all night.

Then (as now) it was an enormously entertaining film. A sloppy film, to be sure—meandering, misshapen, with bit and supporting players giving line readings not worthy of a high school play, and the lines themselves often not much better, wardrobe that had the neatly pressed look of a dude ranch masquerade, continuity errors like that notorious shifting crutch, and other failings. And yet it suceeded in a way that many more ambitious and more disciplined movies never could. As Hawks had promised, in lieu of a plot it offered Wayne and Mitchum “riding again,” a study more than a story—of friendship and redemption, danger and good times. For some admirers of
El Dorado,
its concentration on its heroes’ infirmities and physical deterioration—paralyzing bullet wounds, alcoholism, both stars on crutches at the fade-out—and the inclusion of an Edgar Allan Poe poem with its references to failing strength and the Valley of the Shadow—revealed this as Hawks’s elegy on aging and death. For many more, though, its value was of the less profound but likely more pleasurable sort, as a funny, violent, engaging, rather antiquated movie that played across the screen like a favorite old tune heard on the radio one more time.

It was arguably the last great Western for everyone involved.

“You ask if I have one favorite memory of working with Mitchum, and I do,” said Robert Donner. “It was late one night in Old Tucson. There were hours when none of us had anything to do but wait, and if you were looking for Mitchum you could usually find him off by himself in the dark street. You
could find him by the glow of his cigarette. He smoked those Gauloises, French tobacco, smelled like shit. And you’d go walking in the dark on the street there, and you could see the little glow. And from the dark he called out to me. He always called me ‘Mother Donner.’ And I sat down there and we talked. I was new in the business, and I didn’t know my head from a hot rock and he knew it. And Mitchum talked and tried to tell me a few things, and finally he said to me, ‘Just know that this business can afford you some wonderful opportunities. Don’t miss them, boy. Don’t waste it. You’ll see great things. . . .’ He said, ‘The movie business has been like a
magic carpet
for me. I’ve been to places, seen things . . .
wonderful
things.’ And I could not even begin to imagine what kind of things Robert Mitchum had seen, you know. So we just sat there in the night, and he went back to smoking that shitty French cigarette. I don’t know. I guess it’s not much, but that little conversation stayed with me. You remember funny things like that when you look back. . . . “